A few readers have sent the following response from Target regarding the che CD case:
Thanks for sharing your thoughts and feelings about the Che Guevara CD case. We have made the decision to remove this item from our shelves.
It is never our intent to offend any of our guests through the merchandise we carry and we sincerely apologize for any discomfort this situation may have caused our guests. We appreciate the time you’ve taken to write us and will pass your comments along to our buyers.
We always welcome your feedback, so if there’s ever any question you have about our products or service, please call our Target Guest Relations team at 800-440-0680. We also invite you to share your comments whenever you visit a Target store or on the Internet at www.Target.com.
I hope we’ll see you again soon at Target.
Sincerely,
Jennifer Hanson
Target Executive Offices
Thanks to all who wrote Target with their thoughts.
And to think that there were some who mocked us for boycotting Target.
Looks like we have the final laugh!
Excellent news! Thanks for giving us the “heads up” on this in the first place.
Everyone have a wonderful Christmas (or such other Holiday as you may celebrate this time of year).
Any time we can use political correctness to our advantage, we win. Great Christmas present.
I’m so glad!! It may have been a simple matter of bringing to their attention the reality and irony of what was on their merchandise. At the end, This was a home run against the “myth”!Somewhere in Corporate Target, there’s a buyer who now knows better!!! Let’s shop!! 🙂
I wish you well 🙂 Melek
“The time is always right to do what is right.” ~ MLK
Hip, hip, Hurrah!
just another brick in the wall.
A couple of points.
I will be shopping at Target again. Kudos to them for doing the right thing.
Capitalism and choices work. When you have competition, you HAVE to listen.
Rick and Alex: a big, wet, hearty raspberry to both of you.
I think the thing here was that some buyer somewhere in Minnesota made a decision to buy some rinky dink piece of merhandise without knowing what implications it had. Target doesn’t need or want the controversy so they did the right thing and dumped the product. Probably made the supplier eat it, and they’ll probably end up at Marshalls or flea markets or whatever but so what? Those of us who like target can shop their knowing that they listened and acted.
I got the same note back. I wrote to every email address I could find on the Target website, asking if they were going to stock Hitler t-shirts, Stalin coffee mugs and Mao mousepads, too. I suggested Jeffrey Dahmer, Son of Sam and Ted Bundy products as well if they were looking for their 30 pieces of silver. Just clueless. This is what happens when you hire people who’ve never cracked a history book.
Yay! I got the same email in response.
Score one for sanity.
YAAAAAAYYYYY!!! I’m so happy we can shop at Target again! Especially because they did the right thing. Go us!
Che? Still dead!
I had being following up this since the fist post and never commented to it. Now that the controversy is over, let me mention how frustrated I was when it started. Two days before reading here about the CD case I had decide to do most of my Christmas shopping in Target due to the fact that they are the only one in national TV that have an add that actually said “Merry Christmas” unlike other that trying to be too PC only talk about the “Holidays Season”.
Now that it looks like that the ill decision of selling the dammed CD case was probably the result of some stupid purchased agent that didn’t had a clue of who that murder was I am going back tomorrow to Target to continue my Christmas shopping.
And Merry Christmas to all babalusians! And… Mucho lechon assado con yuca!
Sooo… we’re all in agreement here that the boycott worked, right? What happens if we swap the word “boycott” for “embargo?” 😉
The Wall Street Journal
December 22, 2006; Page A13
Che, Cuba and Christmas
By MARY ANASTASIA O’GRADY
Until yesterday Christmas shoppers at Target department stores could purchase a 24-CD
carrying case decorated with the image of Che Guevara. When I heard about it, I wondered
why the retailer would want to promote the memory of a mass murderer. What’s next, I
asked, when I spoke with a representative of the company on Wednesday, Pol Pot pajamas?
Late Wednesday evening Target sent me this statement: “It is never our intent to offend
any of our guests through the merchandise we carry. We have made the decision to remove
this item from our shelves and we sincerely apologize for any discomfort this situation
may have caused our guests.”
The fact that it took only a day for Target to make that admirable decision suggests
that at least someone at the company knows who Guevara was and what Cuba is today thanks
in part to him. The misstep, though, probably occurred because others at the company
allowed Target to become a target itself of the Che myth.
(Che myth: Not quite as vile as the skinheads’ adulation of Adolf Hitler, but much more
stupid. Lew)
Guevara is not just a dead white guy from a well-to-do family who terrorized a racially
mixed nation and executed hundreds of innocents in the late 1950s and 1960s. He is also
a symbol of the totalitarian regime that persists in Cuba, which still practices his
ideology of intolerance, hatred and repression. It is not the torture and killing alone
that make the tragedy. That only describes the methodology. Guevara’s wider goal — to
forcibly strip a population of its soul and spirit — is what is truly frightening and
deplorable. Christians, who celebrate the birth of their Savior on Monday, have
particularly suffered under Guevara’s dream of revolution, which has lasted since 1959.
The fear under which Cubans have lived for 48 years was fathered by the merciless Che
Guevara. The unhappy Argentine Marxist met Fidel Castro in Mexico in 1955 and later
became a rebel commander. “The Black Book of Communism,” published in 1999 by Harvard
University Press, notes that early in his career Guevara earned a “reputation for
ruthlessness; a child in his guerrilla unit who had stolen a little food was immediately
shot without trial.” In his will, the book says, “this graduate of the school of terror
praised the ‘extremely useful hatred that turns men into effective, violent, merciless
and cold killing machines.'”
Peruvian-born Alvaro Vargas Llosa penned his own book this year titled “The Che Guevara
Myth.” Mr. Vargas Llosa documents a twisted life, such as when Che shot a comrade and
made the following entry in his diary: “I ended the problem with a .32 caliber pistol,
in the right side of his brain. . . . His belongings were now mine.” After that, Mr.
Vargas Llosa says, Guevara shot “a peasant who expressed the desire to leave whenever
the rebels moved on.” Guevara also liked to simulate executions, as a form of torture.
“At every stage of his adult life, his megalomania manifested itself in the predatory
urge to take over other people’s lives and property, and to abolish their free will.”
Guevara was an architect of Cuba’s forced labor camps, which by 1965 were transformed
into concentration camps for dissidents, homosexuals, people with AIDS, Catholics,
Jehovah’s Witnesses, and Cubans of other religious sects.
All independent thought that refused to worship the communist state was an affront to
Guevara. Christians were an especially difficult lot. From the earliest days after
Castro took power, Che sent hundreds of men to face firing squads at the Havana prison
known as La Cabaña. His victims could be heard at dawn loudly crying “Long live Christ
the King, down with communism,” just before the rifle shots rang out.
Thousands of Cubans have perished in daring attempts to get off the island because they
preferred the risks of flight to a life in which Christianity has been forbidden,
children are the property of the state, thought is policed and spying on your neighbor
is one of the few ways to earn a living. During the Mariel boat lift in 1980, witnesses
told of families arriving at the pier together only to be separated by Cuban guards who
enjoyed watching their misery. Weeping mothers faced the point of a gun while their
distraught sons and daughters were forced to board ships. This Christmas thousands of
Cuban-Americans will remember their loved ones who didn’t make it out or died trying.
Defenders of Guevara can’t even claim that his cruelty brought about equality. Today
state policy makes it a crime for the raggedly dressed, malnourished and mostly black
Cuban people to visit the beaches, museums and amply stocked stores of their own
country, while well-fed tourists in fashionable cruise-wear go where they like. This
amounts to de facto apartheid.
Amazingly, hope is still alive in Cuba. One reason is because although Guevara was able
to kill a lot of Christians, neither he nor his successors succeeded in wiping out
Christianity. The struggling Christian community, which takes seriously the religious
teaching to reject fear in the face of evil, is playing a key role in the island’s
dissident movement.
An icon of the Christian resistance is Oscar Elias Biscet, a black physician who is
serving a 25-year sentence for his peaceful activism against the regime. He has been
arrested more than 26 times since he began to express his dissent; he has been beaten,
tortured and locked in tiny windowless cells for days on end. Hundreds of other
prisoners of conscience are in jail, under atrocious conditions; many are also devout
Christians.
The Christian faith has survived Che and Fidel and decades of brainwashing. It is
battered but has not been defeated. Raul Castro fears it — which is why he takes Bibles
away from his unbreakable prisoners. The moral of the story seems to be that even the
all- powerful regime cannot stop Christmas from coming to Cuba.