Seven Oaks Magazine.

Che Guevara on screen and in print: The Motorcycle Diaries
Derrick O'Keefe
September 7 , 2004

Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara, the ubiquitous t-shirt icon, will be coming to North America’s movie theatres this fall in The Motorcycle Diaries, which chronicles the young Che’s formative journey across Latin America. Or rather, I should say that Che is returning to the big screen, for those who remember Omar Sharif as the guerilla fighter in the 1969 film Che!, which also starred, believe it or not, Jack Palance as Fidel Castro. This latest effort, produced by Robert Redford, and directed by Walter Salles, appears at least sympathetic to its subject’s later revolutionary career. Already playing in Latin America, it is set for a wide North American release on September 24, and promises to generate interest in Che Guevara’s life, ideas, and struggle.

Ocean Press has anticipated this renewed interest, and has a series of new titles by Guevara, either in the form of new selections or republished old classics, such as the new editions of The Motorcycle Diaries: Notes On A Latin American Journey, including a movie tie-in edition. This version of the book includes a touching new preface by Che’s daughter, Aleida Guevara, and previously unreleased travel photos taken by the young rebel. This was Che Guevara’s first book, the unpolished work of a twenty-three year-old still discovering both his political beliefs and his narrative voice. But it is noteworthy for the insights it provides into the character of one of the great revolutionaries of the twentieth century, the man that Jean-Paul Sartre declared “the most complete human being of our era.”

Assassinated in Bolivia before the age of forty, Ernesto Guevara led a remarkable life, spurred on first by wanderlust, and later by his zealous belief in the revolutionary’s duty to be “consumed by this uninterrupted activity that ends only with death,” as he described it in his treatise Socialism and Man in Cuba (1965). His travels took him from medical school and a middle class life in Argentina to repeated journeys across Latin America; to Guatemala in 1954, where he witnessed the U.S.-backed overthrow of the democratically elected Jacobo Arbenz; to Mexico, where he had a fateful meeting with Fidel Castro and joined the Cuban revolutionaries; and to the Sierra Maestra, where his co-fighters simply called him ‘Che’, as together with a nation-wide movement they overthrew the Batista dictatorship. After the Revolution’s triumph in 1959, Che took on important posts including head of the Agrarian Reform and the National Bank. In the mid 1960s, Che undertook to lead guerilla missions in the Congo, and in Bolivia, where he was killed in 1967.

The Motorcycle Diaries follows Ernesto and his friend Alberto Granado, who was twenty-nine years-old, on a journey across South America propelled by their dubious two-wheeler which they had christened La Poderosa. Leaving from Argentina, after Ernesto’s reluctant parting from his girlfriend, the pair crossed the Andes to Chile, and continued up through Peru, Bolivia, and Colombia, before parting ways in Caracas, Venezuela.

Che’s writing, at times, reveals a young man trying too hard to make profound observations. In later years, his prose would become more understated and purposeful, while still containing great literary as well as political value. I’m thinking in particular of Che’s memoirs of the struggle in the Sierra Maestra, Episodes of the Cuban Revolutionary War, 1956-58, a collection less likely to be made into a Hollywood movie.

But these initial diaries are also compelling, if only at times, especially when we get the occasional glimpse of the future revolutionary leader. There is Che’s impromptu speech at his twenty-fourth birthday party, thrown by workers at the leper colony in Peru where they had volunteered, in which he toasts Latin American unity, in a mild precursor to his later militant anti-imperialism. In Chile, the two Argentines spend a cold night with a penniless communist miner and his wife, whom Che describes as “a living symbol of the proletariat the world over.”

By the end of the journey, in an entry entitled “Afterthough,” Che’s commitment to a life of struggle has obviously gone from vague sentiment to hardened conviction. In a passage that could only be described as grossly over-the-top were it not confirmed by the reminder of Che’s life, he accurately predicts that “when the great guiding spirit cleaves humanity into two antagonistic halves, I will be with the people.”

The best way to understand Che Guevara -- and the political ideas he developed in a mere fifteen years of frenetic political activity -- is to read from his own remarkably prolific writings. The Australian-based Ocean Press, which also has an office in Havana, Cuba, has an impressive stock of Che’s writings, and more on the way. One can only hope that these works are widely read, lest Che become one more revolutionary figure of the past reduced to meaningless icon of pop culture. With the abject poverty that Che and Alberto witnessed more than half a century ago still prevalent throughout so much of Latin America and the world, a new generation needs to set out to discover the real life and ideas behind the face on the t-shirt. And The Motorcycle Diaries is just the beginning of that journey.

The Motorcycle Diaries (Movie Tie-In Edition), Notes on a Latin American Journey, by Ernesto Che Guevara (paper) 175pp plus 24pp b&w photos 1-920888-10-1 2004 BIOGRAPHY