Viva la revolución! Backchat was getting all nostalgic for his student days among the revolutionaries of the National Union of Students (all now New Labour MPs) when he read about the copyright row over the famous picture of the Cuban revolutionary and student icon Che Guevara.
Guevara, you will recall, was lieutenant to Cuba's revolutionary leader Fidel Castro, the man who once described discovering Marxism as “like finding a map in a forest”. Backchat thinks it must have been a treasure map. Alberto Gutierrez, the Cuban photographer who took the famous photo of Guevara, is not only suing for misuse of his copyright, he has asked the Cuba Solidarity Campaign to license usage in the UK from now on.
When Insurance Times rang to ask permission to use the image, the campaign tried to charge five times as much as the leading picture libraries and insisted on us paying for a bike to courier the picture there and back within two hours. Even after negotiation, the image is one of the most expensive pictures we have ever published (and thus why it is not reproduced again here).
Are these the revolutionary socialist principles espoused by the great Cuban revolutionaries? Backchat would like to think that Guevara must be turning in his grave.
