On October 9, 1967, the man died and the symbol was born. The turning point may have been an overly blue photo, showing him disheveled and with dried blood on his ribs. The cold and lost gaze, as thoughtful and not already dead, over the laundry tub. Next to him, a man smokes as if nothing was happening, and another one, very young, stares at him absorbed.

Now, there is graffiti on that same wall: "If they want to kill freedom, let them, those who hide it, do it." Nothing that surrounded Che escapes from that man-legend duality that today makes him a cultural symbol throughout the world.

Not his corpse, that for Sussana Osinaga, the nurse who washed him, "He lookes as Jesus Christ." Not that laundry where the Bolivian army showed "the dead pigs", so they could see what happened to the communists, and today they have changed the tap for a basket of flowers and the blue walls for declarations of principles.

Che is not just a song from October to October or a photo of Korda sublimated on millions of T-shirts. It is the controversy (perhaps polysemy) that does not let him die because he dusts every diaries, notebooks and biographies. It is Socialism and the man in Cuba being studied in the philosophy programs of the universities.

His notes taken from Prague are an intermediate stop between the Congo and Bolivia, where he put a critical eye on the course of socialism in Eastern Europe. His economic thinking forged with discipline and study.

There are thousands of verses that he inspired before and after Mario Terán's burst of shots buckled his legs. The voices of Frank Delgado, Carlos Puebla, Nicolás Guillén. Your children ate the same bread that I ate / We went to the same school. You come sowing the breeze / with spring suns. And not because they burn you, / because they hide you underground, / because they hide you / in a cemetery, forests, moors, / they will prevent us from finding you. The evidence that the symbol was born in October. And forever.