As the Cuban revolution celebrates its 50th anniversary, it's hard to recall the enmity that led the United States to threaten and embargo its small neighbor for all these decades. Oh, right, Cuba is a communist regime, so we can't trade with them, just like, uh, China?

U.S. foreign policy may be dubious, but there's no doubt surrounding the continued potency of Cuba's most famous revolutionary, Ernesto "Che" Guevara. An Argentine doctor-turned-rebel who helped Fidel Castro overthrow Cuba's dictatorship, Guevara was eventually executed while trying to export the revolution to Bolivia in 1967. Guevara lives on, though, as a totemistic martyr figure for the secular left; anti-Yanqui, anti-imperialist hero to Latin America's new left (including, ironically, Bolivia's current president); and a Pop Art phenomenon whose face — in that iconic photo by Alberto "Korda" Gutierrez — has graced a zillion T-shirts, coffee mugs and even bikinis.

For such a ubiquitous figure, Che has rarely been covered by cinema: A horrendously inept 1969 film with Omar Sharif in the lead ("Che") bombed at the box office and touched off a drought that continued until Brazilian director Walter Salles released "The Motorcycle Diaries" in 2004, which looked at Guevara's experiences as a young man on a motorcycle trip across Latin America.