The Motorcycle Diaries: a Journey Around South America
By Ernesto Che Guevara
Fourth Estate
$20.95
REVIEW BY STEVEN KATSINERIS
The Motorcycle Diaries is the incredible story of a remarkable road journey, written in the words of a 23-year-old medical student who would become known as Che. This book bought back a lot of memories for me.
When I was 16, I learned of Ernesto Che Guevara when I read about his death in 1967. He was wounded and captured in Bolivia by US special forces and Bolivian soldiers. He was later executed and buried in a secret grave.
I was captivated. Over the next few months I poured over the pages of his books, including the Bolivian Diary (it was one of Che's habits to jot down most of the day's events in a personal diary) and Reminiscences of the Cuban Revolutionary War.
Che thought like I did and his hatred of injustice and inequality, and his ideas about how to overcome it rang true to me. Over the years, I read everything I could find written by or about Che Guevara. Che became my hero and I aspired to be like him.
Ernesto Guevara de la Serna was born on June 14, 1928, in Rosario, Argentina. The nickname, Che came later and stuck to him. Che is commonly used in Argentina to mean pal or mate and Argentinians are often nicknamed Che in other Spanish-speaking countries. Guevara's family, from the upper middle class, shared radical ideas.
@BODY TEXT SPA = In 1948, Ernesto entered the University of Buenos Aires to study medicine. He had a keen interest in literature, travel and, despite suffering bouts of severe asthma, enjoyed sport, especially soccer and rugby union. In 1950, Guevara made a 7000-kilometre trip around northern Argentina on a moped.
In 1951, while still a medical student, Guevara undertook a 10-month-long journey around South America on a Norton 500cc motorcycle called Ala Poderosa (the powerful one). He travelled with an older radical doctor friend, Alberto Granado, who specialised in leprology. This is the trip immortalised in The Motorcycle Diaries.
The Motorcycle Diaries is a vivid account of an adventure of a lifetime and is full of drama and comedy. Guevara and his friend left university and a life of privilege for the road. While there are fights, sexual encounters and drunken parties, there are also very moving illustrations of Che's idealism and his solidarity with the oppressed.
The journey brought them personally face to face with the poverty and inequality in South America. During their travels, the two friends worked with people suffering leprosy and learned of their terrible living conditions. The Motorcycle Diaries is a fascinating historical read which provides an insight into Guevara's radicalisation.
It is a sort of Latin version of Jack Kerouac's On the Road. Che writes in a very natural, free flowing and descriptive style that suits well a travel narrative. His poetic descriptions of the mystery and beauty of a wild and mountainous continent are wonderful.
The book's title is a little misleading because the motorcycle conked out part-way through the journey. However, it becomes more interesting as Guevara and Granado hitchhike on market-bound trucks, travel by narrow-gauge railway, stowaway on freighters, share a cargo plane with horses and travel down a river on a homemade raft. With little money, the two are reliant on others for food, shelter and transport and have to use their wits to get rides and survive.
Che is greatly impressed by the people he meets and praises the hospitality of the common people. He describes incidents like when a Chilean communist sulphur miner says, Come, comrades, come and eat with us. I'm a vagrant too.
The book reveals the young Che embracing the people, culture and ideals of pan-Americanism. He acknowledges in the book that the person who wrote these notes... me, is no longer me, at least I'm not the me I was.
My favourite section of the book is titled As An Afterthought. Guevara has a mystically surreal revelation, in which an old man speaks to him about revolution and sacrifice and foretells Che's destiny of struggle and death. Afterwards, Che writes I now knew that when the great spirit cleaves humanity into two antagonistic halves, I will be with the people.
I found this deeply moving and remembered reading that, as Che waited to be executed, a soldier seeing him deep in thought, mockingly said, Are you thinking about your immortality. Che answered, No I'm thinking about the immortality of the revolution.
The Motorcycle Diaries is a grand and lively tale of discovery, wit, determination and curiosity, that lets the reader into the thoughts and feelings of the young Che, before he was a socialist and a political figure who would change history. This book tells a very human story and proper understanding of Ernesto Che Guevara is truly incomplete without reading it.
Reading this book was an inspiring and delightful experience. It resonates with the heart and spirit of an exceptionally remarkable human being.
If you tremble with indignation at every injustice, then you're a comrade of mine Ernesto Che Guevara, 1928-1967.
From Green Left Weekly, November 6, 2002.
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