The Motorcycle Diaries

Has the Che cult really reached the proportions where not only a new edition, but a new translation, of one of his relatively minor works is necessary? Verso first published The Motorcycle Diaries s in English translation in 1995. Eight years later, Ocean Press has released a new edition of this travelogue as part of its Cuba series and in association with the Che Guevara Studies Center in Havana. Whereas Verso marketed it as “Easy Rider meets Das Kapital,” Ocean Press advertises that the diary is “now a major motion picture from Robert Redford and Walter Salles.” This “expanded edition” includes a preface in which Aleida Guevara discusses the rediscovery of her famous father in the diary, as well as unpublished photos that Che took during the trip.The Motorcycle Diaries chronicles the second of Guevara’s three forays away from his home in Buenos Aires and toward a discovery of Latin America. The first trip in 1950 took him to northern Argentina, where for the first time he witnessed firsthand the depths of poverty that plagued the region. The third trip in 1953 led him to witness the aftermath of the 1952 MNR revolution in Bolivia and the fall of the Arbenz government in Guatemala in 1954. Those events politicized him to the point where he joined Fidel Castro’s guerrilla war against the Batista dictatorship in Cuba.On this second trip, Che traveled with his friend Alberto Granado on a motorcycle nicknamed “La Poderosa II.” A year shy of finishing his medical degree, here the future revolutionary is a college dropout looking for adventure. The trip, based on the principle of improvisation (p. 33), took him from Argentina through Chile, Peru, Colombia, Venezuela, and finally to Miami. The Verso book ended with Che’s father describing a rather miserable month Che spent in Miami. The Ocean Press edition, unfortunately, stops the travel diary in Venezuela and then concludes on a more inspirational note—Che’s reflections on his travels years later to a group of Cuban students. The book is perhaps mistitled, because after crashing the overloaded bike as many as nine times in one day, it finally gave up the ghost in Chile, only about a third of the way into the story. From there, the chronically broke friends hitched rides on the back of trucks and bummed food and shelter off friendly souls they met along the way. Finally, Che traveled to Miami and back to Argentina in a cargo plane.Although these diaries present a “prepolitical” Che, they also reveal the roots of his ideology in formation. For example, when meeting an old woman struggling with asthma complicated by an impoverished environment, the Argentine longs for “a change to prevent the injustice of a system” that failed to meet this person’s needs (p. 70). The brutality of the Chuquicamata mines in northern Chile led the future guerrilla to conclude that communism “was no more than a natural longing for something better” (p. 78). Visiting the Machu Picchu ruins and, more importantly, traveling in the company of indigenous peasants led Che to recognize “a race still fighting for its identity” (p. 118).The two friends and medical students spent several days with Hugo Pesce, a doctor working in a leper colony in Peru. Pesce was a founder of the Peruvian Socialist Party and a close colleague of José Carlos Mariátegui. Che does not detail the content of their conversations, but given his marked disinterest in medicine as a profession, it is safe to assume that they probably discussed politics and Latin America’s social situation more than specific treatment of illnesses. In editing his notes after the trip, Che prefaces his story with the observation that “ ‘our America with a capital A’ has changed me more than I thought” (p. 32). These experiences broke him out of the isolation of his middle-class upbringing and were formative in shaping his ideology.Che aficionados will, of course, want to read his Motorcycle Diaries (if they have not already done so in the Verso edition). In a preface, his widow, Aleida March, notes that in these pages emerges “the extraordinary change which takes place in him as he discovers Latin America” (p. 4). Her comments suggest 4 that an interesting undergraduate essay assignment might be to examine how this early work provides a model for his more ideological essays. Although the content changes, the style remains the same. For class adoption, however, most professors will want to stick with one of his later, more political writings—such as Episodes of the Cuban Revolutionary War, Guerrilla Warfare, Bolivian Diary, or even Ocean Press’s Che Guevara Reader

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