The Motorcycle Diaries

Pre-expedition

Ernesto Guevara spent long periods traveling around Latin America during his studies of medicine beginning in 1948, at the University of Buenos Aires. In January 1950, Guevara attempted his first voyage. He traversed 4,500 kilometres (2,800 miles) through the northern provinces of Argentina on a bicycle on which he had installed a small engine. He arrived at San Francisco del Chañar, near Córdoba, where his friend Alberto Granado ran the dispensary of the leper-centre. This experience allowed Guevara to have long conversations with the patients about their disease.

This pre-expedition gave Guevara a taste of what would be experienced in his more extensive South American travels. The journey broke new ground for him in activities that would become central to his life: travelling and writing a diary. His own father called it preparation for his subsequent long journeys across South America.

Guevara relied upon the hospitality of strangers that he encountered, as he and Granado would throughout their later travels. For example, following a puncture, he flagged down a lorry to take him to his next destination. In another instance, in Loreto, he asked for hospitality from a local police officer when he had nowhere to stay. The trip encouraged Guevara's style of traveling that would be seen in the Motorcycle Diaries. By the time he reached Jujuy, he had decided that the best way to get to know and to understand a country was by visiting hospitals and meeting the patients that they housed. He was not interested in the sites for tourists, and preferred meeting the people in custody of the police or the strangers that he met en route with whom he struck up a conversation. Guevara had seen the parallel existence of the poverty and deprivation faced by the native populations. Guevara also noted 'turbulence' in the region under the Río Grande, but having not actually crossed this river, Guevara, historian Jon Lee Anderson argues, used it as a symbol of the United States, and this was an early glimmer of the notion of neocolonial exploitation that would obsess him in later life. For the young Guevara, the trip had been an education.

It was the success of his Argentinian "raid", as he put it, that awakened in him a desire to explore the world and prompted the commencing of new travel plans.

Upon completion of his bicycle journey, El Gráfico, a sports magazine in Argentina, published a picture of Guevara on his bike. The company that manufactured the engine Ernesto had adapted to his bicycle tried to use it for advertising, claiming it was very strong since Guevara had gone on such a long tour using its power.

While he continued studying, he also worked as a nurse on trading and petroleum ships of the Argentine national shipping-company. This allowed Guevara to travel from the south of Argentina to Brazil, Venezuela and Trinidad.

Expedition

This isn't a tale of derring-do, nor is it merely some kind of "cynical account"; it isn't meant to be, at least. It's a chunk of two lives running parallel for a while, with common aspirations and similar dreams. In nine months a man can think a lot of thoughts, from the height of philosophical conjecture to the most abject longing for a bowl of soup – in perfect harmony with the state of his stomach. And if, at the same time, he's a bit of an adventurer, he could have experiences which might interest other people and his random account would read something like this diary.

In January 1952, Guevara's older friend, Alberto Granado, a biochemist, and Guevara, decided to take a year off from their medical studies to embark on a trip they had spoken of making for years: traversing South America on a motorcycle, which has metaphorically been compared to carbureted version of Don Quixote's Rocinante. Guevara and the 29-year-old Granado soon set off from Buenos Aires, Argentina, astride a 1939 Norton 500 cc motorcycle they named La Poderosa II ("The Mighty II") with the idea of eventually spending a few weeks volunteering at the San Pablo Leper colony in Peru on the banks of the Amazon River. In total, the journey took Guevara through Argentina, Chile, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela, Panama, and to Miami, before returning home to Buenos Aires.

The trip was carried out in the face of some opposition by Guevara's parents, who knew that their son was both a severe asthmatic and a medical student close to completing his studies. However, Granado, himself a doctor, assuaged their concerns by guaranteeing that Guevara would return to finish his degree (which he ultimately did).

Their first stop was Miramar, Argentina, a small resort where Guevara's girlfriend, Chichina, was spending the summer with her upper-class family. Two days stretched into eight, and upon leaving, Chichina gave Guevara a gold bracelet. The two men crossed into Chile on 14 February. At one point they introduced themselves as internationally renowned leprosy experts to a local newspaper, which wrote a glowing story about them. The travelers later used the press clipping as a way to score meals and other favors with locals along the way.

We are looking for the bottom part of the town. We talk to many beggars. Our noses inhale attentively the misery.

Transformation

Although it is considered to have been formative, scholars have largely ignored this period of Guevara's life. However, historians and biographers now agree that the experience had a profound impact on Guevara, who later became one of the most famous guerrilla leaders in history. "His political and social awakening has very much to do with this face-to-face contact with poverty, exploitation, illness, and suffering", said Carlos M. Vilas, a history professor at the Universidad Nacional de Lanús in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

In May 2005, Alberto Granado described their journey to the BBC, stating: "The most important thing was to realise that we had a common sensibility for the things that were wrong and unjust." According to Granado, their time at the leper colony of San Pablo in the Amazon also proved pivotal. Recalling that they shared everything with the sick people and describing Guevara's wave on departure as follows: "I got the impression that Che was saying goodbye to institutional medicine and becoming a doctor of the people". Granado later observed that by the end of their journey, "We were just a pair of vagabonds with knapsacks on our backs, the dust of the road covering us, mere shadows of our old aristocratic egos."

According to his daughter Aleida Guevara in a 2004 article, "throughout the book, we can see how Guevara became aware that what poor people needed was not his scientific knowledge as a doctor, but his strength and persistence to bring social change".

Guevara's experience of the South American continent also helped to shape his revolutionary sensibilities. When discussing the plight of the downtrodden Indians of Peru, Granado discussed the formation of an Indian political party to begin a Túpac Amaru Indian Revolution. Guevara allegedly replied, "Revolution without firing a shot? You're crazy?". The journey was also formative in his political beliefs; for example, historian Paulo Drinot notes that the journey stimulated his sentiments of Pan-Americanism that would later shape his revolutionary behaviors.

Scholar Lucía Álvarez De Toledo argues that it was on these motorcycle travels that he "disregarded his social class and his white European racial ancestry" and retained the view of himself as an Argentine, as a member of the United America he had encountered during his travels. Having said this, with the exception of Guatemala, Toledo believed that Guevara showed little concern with the policies of the countries he encountered. Altogether, Guevara's travels in the 1950s played an important role in determining his view on the world "and his later revolutionary trajectory."

Editions

The book was first published in 1993 as Notas de viaje by Casa Editora Abril in Havana, Cuba. The first English edition was brought out by Verso Books in 1995.

A 2003 edition published by Ocean Press and the Che Guevara Studies Center, Havana, included a preface by Guevara's daughter Aleida Guevara March and an introduction by Cintio Vitier. There had been rumors of a conspiracy to prohibit its publication in Cuba, but the director of Ocean Press denied this, saying that the book had been legally published in Cuba and pointing out that the Union of Young Communists brought out an edition, with another to be published by the Che Guevara Studies Center. Furthermore, he has given an assurance that its publication has the support of many people, including Fidel Castro.

In 2004, Aleida Guevara explained that her father had not intended his diary to be published, and that it consisted of "a sheaf of typewritten pages". But already in the 1980s, his family worked on his unpublished manuscripts.

Review

Guevara's youthful Motorcycle Diaries is rebellious in ways that are not immediately obvious. This travelogue shows Ernesto the Medical Student developing a sense of Pan-Latin Americanism that fuses the interests of indigenous Andean peasants with traditional adversaries like upper-middle-class Argentine intellectuals (i.e. Guevara). The book ventures a unified regional opposition to U.S. hegemony and global capitalism's sometimes ravaging effects on Latin America.