Not Che Obama

I got an e-mail urging me to check out the talk on the Internet about a Che Guevara image hanging on the wall in a Barack Obama campaign office. So I plunged into the blogosphere to find out what it was all about.

It started with a television station in Houston that ran a story showing a local Obama volunteer office with a Cuban flag adorned with the famous image of Che, long hair flowing beneath the beret with the star, looking off dreamily into some distant epic.

He was probably contemplating his next murder. After all, he once said it was imperative for his followers to become "an effective, violent, selective, cold killing machine." Those followers needed only follow his example. In Cuba, Guevara was in charge of sham trials that sentenced hundreds to execution by firing squad.

Worse, it apparently wasn't a case of naive Che chic from some kid who knows nothing about the man but thinks he looks cool on a T-shirt. The middle-aged Obama supporter who hung the flag was interviewed by the same television station and said she was Cuban-American. It is pretty much guaranteed that when a politically active adult of Cuban origin hangs a Guevara picture, it's a consciously pro-Castro political testimonial.

She wouldn't own up to it, telling the reporter several times that she did not have time to talk about it.

Plenty of people, though, found time to blog about it. On the right, there's an effort to make Che Obama go viral, into a new Swift Boat.

"Obama won't wear flag pin but displays Cuban Flag in his Houston Office," screams AmericanThinker.com, which describes itself as "devoted to the thoughtful exploration of issues."

Over at Babalublog.com, an anti-Castro blog with which I am often in agreement, there are no less than two photoshopped morphs of Che and Obama.

Journalistically, it's all reprehensible. And as to promoting democracy in Cuba, it's counterproductive.

Obama had nothing, zero, to do with the Guevara flag. The campaign ordered it taken down and issued a statement on its Web site that said, "The office featured in this video is funded by volunteers of the Obama Campaign and is not an official headquarters for his campaign."

I called Obama's press people. Was there concern that anti-Castro Cuban-American voters considering support for Obama in the fall will be turned off?

He first wrote about that in an op-ed some months ago for The Miami Herald. Obama said he would use the trade embargo to "bargain on behalf of democracy with a post-Fidel government," but also said he would lift restrictions now in place and "grant Cuban Americans unrestricted rights to visit family and send remittances to the island."

Would that make Cubans "less dependent on the Castro regime" and more able to "advance peaceful political and economic reform" as Obama claims, or simply enrich the dictatorship, like critics insist?

It's a legitimately debatable issue. What's not justifiable is to paint Obama as an admirer of Che and Fidel. That makes anti- Castro activists look like right-wing slime merchants -- thereby giving ammunition to the left-wing smear merchants who want the embargo lifted because they truly are admirers of Che and Fidel.

- Roger Hernandez is a syndicated columnist and writer-in-residence at New Jersey Institute of Technology.