Culture: Che Postage Stamp by Ireland angers "Miami faithful"

Fifty years after he was gunned down in a Bolivian jungle, revolutionary iconoclast Ernesto "Che" Guevara is still setting off controversy.

This week marks the anniversary of the death of the Argentina-born figure who helped Fidel Castro topple the Batista regime in 1959. To honor the occasion, the Irish government has released a one euro stamp featuring the image of the revolutionary.

But across the Atlantic Ocean, the commemorative postage is not sitting well with the families still reeling from the aftershocks of the Cuban revolution and the Castro regime, the Irish Times reports.

The connection between Guevara and Ireland is not random. Che's father, Ernesto Guevara Lynch, was a civil engineer of Irish descent. "The first thing to note is that in my son's veins flowed the blood of Irish rebels," the elder Guevara told an interviewer in 1969.

According to the New York Times, family's roots stretch back to two families, the Lynches and the Blakes, who were among the original founding 14 tribes of the Irish city of Galway. "Patrick Lynch immigrated to Argentina in the mid-1700s and settled in Buenos Aires," an Irish politician explained to the Times in 2012. "Che is part of the Irish diaspora, I would say."

But if there's one place on the globe where Guevara is not welcome, it is South Florida, the homebase of the vocal and politically active Cuban-American expat community. And last weekend, Rep. Illeana Ros-Lehtinen, a Havana-born Cuban who represents the Miami area, blasted the Irish stamp as a "grotesque insult to the many lives he slaughtered."

Conservative activists like Jack Posobiec have also jumped on the radical symbolism, comparing the stamp to "commemorating Timothy McVeigh. "Ireland just put domestic terrorist Che Guevara on a stamp bc of his Irish heritage. That's like commemorating Timothy McVeigh," Posobiec wrote on Twitter.

Further complaints have come from within the Irish government.

Referring this week to the stamp as "totally objectionable," Irish Senator Neale Richmond has written to the country's minister for communication demanding for more information on the decision-making process. According to the Times, Richmond compared the decision to giving Cambodian dictator Pol Pot or Romanian strongman Nicolae Ceausescu a similar honor.

"Although Che Guevara seems now to be classed as a romantic revolutionary figure and that some of his political ideals might be shared by some in this country, it is my belief that he is most definitely not a suitable candidate for such an honour," Richmond wrote. "Minister, as you will be aware, Che Guevara was a violent revolutionary whose legacy has been greatly glossed over."