NEW YORK (Reuters) - It is said to be the most reproduced photo in the world. But just who is Ernesto "Che" Guevara and what has the photo of him, taken at a funeral for victims of an explosion in Cuba's Havana Harbor, come to mean? "Isn't he the guy who invented mojitos?" says an American man wearing a T-shirt of the image in "Chevolution," a film about Cuban Alberto Korda's photo of the revolutionary that premiered at New York's Tribeca Film Festival.
Reproductions of Korda's image of the long-haired Argentine guerrilla wearing a soldier's beret with a single star -- who helped Fidel Castro to power in Cuba's 1959 revolution -- have propelled him to become a global symbol of rebellion.
The image has been reproduced around the world on T-shirts, mugs, baseball caps, vodka bottles, cigarette packets, watches, bikinis and other products of a capitalist consumer society that he fought against.
"Ernesto was a bit sarcastic," says Carlos "Calica" Ferrer, an Argentine friend of Guevara, in the 90-minute documentary. "I'm sure he would be laughing about it."
British curator Trisha Ziff, who co-directed "Chevolution" with Mexican Luis Lopez, said the film grew from an exhibition she created on representations of the photo of Guevara, who was killed in Bolivia in 1967 by Bolivian troops at age 39.
She told Reuters she was surprised by the "ignorance in relation to an American youth audience who would wear him on their T-shirt and not have any idea about the ideology, the ideas of this man."
"It comes back to ideas and hope and our desire within humanity to have heroes," Ziff said. "He became folklore. He's a Robin Hood in a way, it's as basic as that."
Guevara remains a national hero in Cuba, remembered for promoting unpaid voluntary work by toiling shirtless on building sites or hauling sacks of sugar. He still appears on banknotes cutting sugar cane in the fields.
He left Cuba in 1966 to start a new anti-U.S. rebellion in the jungle of eastern Bolivia, hoping to create "two, three, many Vietnams" in Latin America.
"Chevolution" explains the story behind the 1960 photo, which was only published once in a Cuban newspaper in the year after it was taken before emerging in Europe seven years later as a symbol of protest and dissent. Its popularity grew after Irish artist Jim Fitzpatrick created a copyright-free poster using the image in 1968.
(Editing by Daniel Trotta and Eric Beech)
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