¿Venceremos o Venderemos? The Transnationalization and Neiman Marxistization of the Icon of Che Guevara.

Blum, Denise. “¿Venceremos o Venderemos? The Transnationalization and Neiman Marxistization of the Icon of Che Guevara.” Cuba Transnational. Gainesville:University Press of Florida, 2005.

Denise Blum is an assistant professor at CSU. She performed fieldwork in Cuba while researching her book “Cuban Youth and Revolutionary Values: Allá en la lucha.” Blum uses Korda’s iconographic photo of Ché Guevara to explore transnationalism and “image culture” in Cuba. She shows how history and culture become more vulnerable to subjectivity as transnationalism reworks them. She uses various examples—Madonna’s abduction of the revolutionary beret, and the adoption of Ché’s name by an Egyptian entrepreneur looking to blend casual dining and guerilla warfare—to illustrate how “liberation marketing” and culture commodification distort meaning, and change the way meanings are received