Che Guevara
In early 1965, Guevara went to Africa to offer his knowledge and experience as a guerrilla to the ongoing conflict in the Congo. According to Algerian President Ahmed Ben Bella, Guevara thought that Africa was imperialism's weak link and so had enormous revolutionary potential. Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser, who had fraternal relations with Che since his 1959 visit, saw Guevara's plan to fight in Congo as "unwise" and warned that he would become a "Tarzan" figure, doomed to failure. Despite the warning, Guevara traveled to Congo using the alias Ramón Benítez. He led the Cuban operation in support of the Marxist Simba movement, which had emerged from the ongoing Congo crisis. Guevara, his second-in-command Víctor Dreke, and 12 other Cuban expeditionaries arrived in Congo on April 24, 1965, and a contingent of approximately 100 Afro-Cubans joined them soon afterward. For a time, they collaborated with guerrilla leader Laurent-Désiré Kabila, who had helped supporters of the overthrown president Patrice Lumumba to lead an unsuccessful revolt months earlier. As an admirer of the late Lumumba, Guevara declared that his "murder should be a lesson for all of us". Guevara, with limited knowledge of Swahili and the local languages, was assigned a teenage interpreter, Freddy Ilanga. Over the course of seven months, Ilanga grew to "admire the hard-working Guevara", who "showed the same respect to black people as he did to whites". However, Guevara soon became disillusioned with the poor discipline of Kabila's troops and later dismissed him, stating "nothing leads me to believe he is the man of the hour".
Che Guevara in popular culture
Mexican author Rogelio Villareal has noted how "the famous image is not venerated by all ... it has also been aged, laughed about, parodied, insulted, and distorted around the world." Conservative Mark Falcoff has remarked that Guevara is "a cultural icon" not because of "his example for poor countries" but as a result of "his capacity to provoke empathy among the spoiled youth of the affluent West." Historian Robert Conquest, of the Hoover Institution, has referred to such "empathy" and adulation among the young, as the "unfortunate affliction" of "adolescent revolutionary romanticism." Sean O'Hagan of "The Observer" contends that the appeal to such empathy is one of superficiality, remarking that "if Che hadn't been born so good-looking, he wouldn't be a mythical revolutionary." In the view of Ana Menéndez, author of the novel "Loving Che", the fascination with Che is not with the man, but the photograph. While herself acknowledging him as a "great idealist", Menéndez believes there is a "fallibility of memory", which leads many to "gloss over the fact that he was also a brutal man, the head of a firing squad in the opening days of the revolution." Menéndez theorizes that such unsavory aspects are glossed over in the way one glosses over someone's flaws when in love. Jazz musician Paquito D'Rivera, himself a Cuban exile who fled the island after a run-in with Guevara, has criticized the positive portrayal of Che by musicians such as Santana, by noting the strict censorship of music at the time deemed "immoral" and "imperialist" by the Cuban government. In deference to such contradictions, Patrick Symmes, author of "Chasing Che: A Motorcycle Journey in Search of the Guevara Legend", has hypothesized that "the more time goes by, the chicer and chicer Che gets because the less he stands for anything." Barcelona museum director Ivan de la Nuez, in the 2008 documentary ""Chevolution"" describes the overall phenomena by observing that "Capitalism devours everything – even its worst enemies."