Today is the fortieth anniversary of the death of Ché Guevarra. It’s also the day that the U.S. government officially celebrates Columbus Day. At first glance, the coincidence may seem like a match made in heaven for folks like Hugo Chávez, who renamed the holiday Day of Indigenous Resistance in 2002 and sported the iconic Ché t-shirt to the World Social Forum in 2005.

And for me also (I admit I had a gigantic poster of Ché on my wall in high school), the overlap of red-letter days has provided the fodder for a blog – albeit, not of the celebratory variety. I’m sure I had some fuzzy notion in high school that Ché stood for freedom from oppression, disenfranchisement, poverty, just like the fuzzy notion I’d been fed in elementary school that Christopher Columbus was a great man who discovered America. While both of those statements may be true from a certain perspective, it’s the narrow one of the establishment, both left and right.

After the Cuban revolution, Ché’s first job was head of the main prison, La Cabaña (The Cottage), where enemies of the new state, then dissidents, and eventually gays were incarcerated or sent to labor camps. Two years after Castro came to power, there were 300,000 Cubans in prison—one out of every twenty-one citizens of Cuba. According to Humberto Fontova, author of Exposing the Real Ché Guevarra, Ché signed 400 death warrants and personally executed as many as 180 people during his first three months at the prison. Stalin and Mao would surely have cheered on the extermination of back-talk, debate, indifference, and alternative lifestyles, but you have to wonder what Johnny Depp, Angelina Jolie, Madonna, and Prince Harry see in the guy to admire.

Not only that, but there exists the fact of Ché’s legacy and the hundreds of dissidents in Cuba’s prisons at this very moment. In 2003, ten independent librarians decided to offer their solidarity to librarians in Cuba and to join in the demand by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch for the release of Cuban prisoners of conscience. For some reason, this decision was not supported by their colleagues at the American Library Association.

Back to Columbus: While the great tragedy of disease perpetuated by the Spanish colonists was not deliberate or even understood at the time (approximately 85% of the native population of America died of infections, primarily smallpox), Columbus personally carried out acutely cruel punishments and death sentences on specific persons and tribes. The Taino of Hispaniola no longer populate this planet.

On the other hand, I don’t see his image on street corners, advertisements, or a president’s chest. Columbus is no poster-boy for explorers and adventurers. No fashion photographer was standing around on a foredeck in 1492, ready to snap the photo of the century like Korda got his in 1960—the photo that ubiquitously adorns the mugs and t-shirts. While a picture may be worth a thousand words, I think in this case it says more about the person who is buying than the man named Ché himself.

Ché once said, “Those who shut down the doors to peaceful resolutions open the doors to violent revolutions.” He should know.