The Motorcycle Diaries
Che Guevara’s remains were finally discovered in 1997 and returned to Cuba. A memorial was built at Santa Clara in central Cuba, where he had won a major military battle during the Cuban revolutionary war.
brief chronology of ernesto che guevara
1928
Ernesto Guevara is born on June 14 in Rosario, Argentina. He is the first child of middle-class parents Ernesto Guevara Lynch and Celia de la Serna.
1932
The Guevara family moves from Buenos Aires to Alta Gracia, a spa town near Córdoba, on account of Ernesto’s chronic asthma. His asthma also prevents him from regular attendance at school until he is nine years old.
1948
Altering his initial plan to study engineering, Ernesto enrolls in medical school at the University of Buenos Aires, while holding a series of part-time jobs, including in an allergy treatment clinic.
1950
Ernesto sets out on a 4,500 kilometer trip around the north of Argentina on a motorized bicycle.
1951–52
In October 1951, Ernesto and his friend Alberto Granado decide on a plan to ride Alberto’s motorbike (La Poderosa II — The Mighty One) to North America. Granado is a biochemist who had specialized in leprology and whose younger brothers had been Ernesto’s school friends. They leave Córdoba in December, heading first to farewell Ernesto’s family in Buenos Aires. The adventures experienced on this trip, written up by Ernesto during and after the journey, comprise this book, published first as Notas de Viaje (Travel Notes or The Motorcycle Diaries).
1953
Ernesto graduates as a doctor and almost immediately embarks on another journey around Latin America which takes in Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, Panama, Costa Rica and Guatemala, where he meets Antonio (Ñico) López, a young Cuban revolutionary. In Bolivia, he is witness to the Bolivian Revolution. The account of these travels was first published as Otra Vez (in English, Latin America Diaries).
1954
Ernesto’s political views are profoundly radicalized when in Guatemala he sees the overthrow of the democratically elected government of Jacobo árbenz by U.S.-backed forces. He escapes to Mexico where he contacts the group of Cuban revolutionary exiles. In Mexico, he marries Peruvian Hilda Gadea, with whom he has a daughter, Hildita.
1955
After meeting Fidel Castro, he agrees to join the group being organized to wage guerrilla war against the Batista dictatorship. Now called “Che” by the Cubans — a common nickname for Argentines — in November 1956 he sails as the troop’s doctor on the yacht Granma.
1956–58
Che soon demonstrates outstanding military ability and is promoted to the rank of commander in July 1957. In December 1958, he leads the Rebel Army to a decisive victory over Batista’s forces at Santa Clara in central Cuba.
1959
In February, Che is declared a Cuban citizen in recognition of his contribution to the island’s liberation. He marries Aleida March, with whom he has four children. In October, he is appointed head of the Industrial Department of the Institute of Agrarian Reform and in November becomes President of the National Bank of Cuba. With a gesture of disdain for money, he signs the new banknotes simply as “Che.”
1960
Representing the revolutionary government, Che undertakes an extensive trip to the Soviet Union, the German Democratic Republic, Czechoslovakia, China and North Korea, signing several key trade agreements.
1961
Che is appointed head of the newly established Ministry of Industry. In August, he heads Cuba’s delegation to the Organization of American States (OAS) at Punta del Este, Uruguay, where he denounces U.S. President Kennedy’s Alliance for Progress.
1962
A fusion of Cuban revolutionary organizations takes place and Che is elected to the National Directorate. Che visits the Soviet Union for the second time.
1963
Che travels to Algeria, which has just won independence from France under the government of Ahmed Ben Bella.
1964
Before heading off for an extensive trip around Africa, Che addresses the UN General Assembly in December.
1965
Che leads an international mission to the Congo to support the liberation movement founded by Patrice Lumumba. Responding to mounting speculation about Che’s whereabouts, Fidel Castro reads Che’s farewell letter to the Central Committee of the newly founded Cuban Communist Party. In December, Che returns to Cuba to prepare in secret for a new mission to Bolivia.
1966
In November, Che arrives in Bolivia in disguise.
1967
In April, Che’s “Message to the Tricontinental” is published, calling for the creation of “two, three, many Vietnams.” The same month, part of his guerrilla group becomes separated from the main detachment. On October 8, the remaining 17 guerrillas are ambushed and Che is wounded and captured. The following day he is murdered by Bolivian forces acting under instructions from Washington. His remains are buried in an unmarked grave along with the bodies of several other guerrilla fighters. October 8 is designated the Day of the Heroic Guerrilla in Cuba.
1997
Che’s remains are finally located in Bolivia and returned to Cuba, where they are placed in a memorial at Santa Clara.
map of the motorcycle diaries
itinerary of the motorcycle diaries
ARGENTINA
1951
December Córdoba to Buenos Aires
1952
January 4 Leave Buenos Aires
January 6 Villa Gesell
January 13 Miramar
January 14 Necochea
January 16–21 Bahía Blanca
January 22 En route to Choele Choel
January 25 Choele Choel
January 29 Piedra del Águila
January 31 San Martín de los Andes
February 8 Nahuel Huapí
February 11 San Carlos de Bariloche
CHILE
February 14 Take the Modesta Victoria to Peulla
February 18 Temuco
February 21 Lautaro
February 27 Los Ángeles
March 1 Santiago de Chile
March 7 Valparaíso
March 8–10 Aboard the San Antonio
March 11 Antofagasta
March 12 Baquedano
March 13–15 Chuquicamata
March 20 Iquique (and the Toco, La Rica Aventura and Prosperidad Nitrate Companies)
March 22 Arica
PERU
March 24 Tacna
March 25 Tarata
March 26 Puno
March 27 Sail on Lake Titicaca
March 28 Juliaca
March 30 Sicuani
March 31 – April 3 Cuzco
April 4–5 Machu Picchu
April 6–7 Cuzco
April 11 Abancay
April 13 Huancarama
April 14 Huambo
April 15 Huancarama
April 16–19 Andahuaylas
April 22–24 Ayacucho to Huancallo
April 25–26 La Merced
April 27 Between Oxapampa and San Ramón
April 28 San Ramón
April 30 Tarma
May 1–17 Lima
May 19 Cerro de Pasco
May 24 Pucallpa
May 25–31 Aboard La Cenepa sailing down Río Ucayali, a tributary of the Amazon
June 1–5 Iquitos
June 6–7 Aboard El Cisne sailing to the leper colony of San Pablo
June 8–20 San Pablo
June 21 Aboard the Mambo-Tango raft on the Amazon
COLOMBIA
June 23 – July 1 Leticia
July 2 Leave Leticia by plane
July 2–10 Bogotá
July 12–13 Cúcuta
VENEZUELA
July 14 San Cristóbal
July 16 Between Barquisimeto and Corona
July 17–26 Caracas, where Che and Alberto separate
UNITED STATES
Late July
Miami
ARGENTINA
August Che returns to his family in Córdoba
CINTIO VITIER
introduction
If there is one hero in Latin America’s struggle for liberation — stretching from Bolívar’s1 time until our own — who has attracted young people from Latin America and from all over the world, that hero is Ernesto Che Guevara. And though since his death he has become a modern myth, he has not yet been stripped of his youthful vitality. To the contrary, his mythic status has only served to heighten his youthfulness which, together with his daring and his purity, seem to constitute the secret essence of his charisma.
Becoming a myth, a symbol of so many scattered and fiercely held hopes, presupposes that such a character possesses a kind of gravity, a certain solemnity. It is good that this is so; historic utopia needs faces to embody it. But we shouldn’t lose sight of the everyday nature of those human beings, who were children, teenagers and young people before they acquired the skills by which to guide us. It is not that I want to bury their exceptional natures in the common or familiar aspects of their lives, but that knowledge of those first, formative stages shows us the starting point for their later trajectories.
This is especially true in Che’s case, whose account of this first trip he made with his friend Alberto Granado offers the young at heart such a close and cheerful, serious and at the same time ironic image of the young man, that we can almost glimpse his smile and hear his voice and asthmatic wheeze. He is young, like them, and he filled his whole life with youthfulness and matured his youth without diluting it.
This edition of The Motorcycle Diaries, the notes describing a journey made without hesitation, aboard the noisy motorcycle La Poderosa II (which gave out halfway, but only after transmitting to the adventure a joyous impulse we, too, receive), free as the wind, with the sole purpose of getting to know the world, is dedicated to people whose youth is not merely sequential, but wholehearted and spiritual.
In the first pages, the young man who would become one of the genuine heroes of the 20th century cautions us, “This is not a story of heroic feats.” The word “heroic” rings out above the others, because we cannot read these pages without thinking of Che’s future, an image of him in the Sierra Maestra, an image which reached perfection at Quebrada del Yuro in Bolivia.2
If this youthful adventure had not been prelude to his revolutionary formation, these pages would be different, and we would read them differently, though we cannot imagine how. Simply knowing that they are Che’s — though he wrote them before becoming Che — makes us believe that he had a presentiment regarding the way they should be read. For example:
The person who wrote these notes passed away the moment his feet touched Argentine soil again. The person who reorganizes and polishes them, me, is no longer, at least I’m not the person I once was. All this wandering around “Our America with a capital A” has changed me more than I thought.
These pages are a testimony — a photographic negative, as he also put it — of an experience that changed him, a first “departure” toward the outer world which, like his final departure, was Quixotic in its semi-unconscious style and, as for Quixote, had the same effect on the scope of his consciousness. This was the “spirit of a dreamer” experiencing an awakening.
In principle, and with the perfect logic of the unforeseeable, their journey was at first directed toward North America, as in fact it turned out to be: toward the “photographic negative” of North America that is South American poverty and helplessness, and toward real knowledge of what North America means for us.
“The enormity of our endeavor escaped us in those moments; all we could see was the dust on the road ahead and ourselves on the bike, devouring kilometers in our flight northward.” Wasn’t that “dust on the road,” though without Che realizing it, really the same dust José Martí3 saw when he traveled from La Guaira to Caracas “in a common little coach”? Wasn’t it the Quixotic dust in which the ghosts of American redemption appeared, “the natural cloud of dust that must rise when our terrible casing of chains falls to the ground”?4 But Martí was coming from the north, and Che was traveling toward himself, catching only glimpses of his destiny, which we glimpse as well through his anecdotes and vignettes.
Comeback, the little dog with “aviator’s impulses” Che presents to us so comically, leaping around the motorcycle from Villa Gesell to Miramar, reappears years later in the Sierra Maestra mountains as a puppy who must be strangled, because of its “hysterical howls” during an unsuccessful ambush laid in the hope of catching [Batista’s notorious army colonel] Sánchez Mosquera. “With one last nervous twitch, the puppy stopped moving. There it lay, sprawled out, its little head spread over the twigs.”5 But, at the end of this incident from Episodes of the Revolutionary War, another dog appears lying in the hamlet of Mar Verde:
Félix patted its head, and the dog looked at him. Félix returned the glance, and then he and I exchanged a guilty look. Suddenly everyone fell silent. An imperceptible stirring came over us, as the dog’s meek yet roguish gaze seemed to contain a hint of reproach. There, in our presence, though observing us through the eyes of another dog, was the murdered puppy.
It was Comeback who had returned, living up to his name, reminding us also of what Ezequiel Martínez Estrada, our other great Argentine, said about José Martí’s campaign diary:
These emotions, these sensations, cannot be described or expressed in the language of poets and painters, musicians and mystics; they must be… absorbed without reply, as animals do with their contemplative and entranced eyes.6
A comparison of Episodes with The Motorcycle Diaries shows us that, even though more than 10 years had passed, the latter was a literary model for the former. It contains the same moderation; the same candor; the same nimble freshness; exactly the same concept of moments used to provide unity for each brief chapter; and, of course, the same imperturbable steadiness that accepts both happy and tragic events without sharp inhalation or exhalation.
It isn’t literary skill but fidelity to experience and narrative effectiveness that is sought. When both are attained, skill follows naturally, taking its allotted place, neither blinding nor disturbing but making its contribution. Here, with little fumbling or hesitation, Che’s style is already formed. The years would polish it, just as he himself polished his will with the pleasure of an artist, though not that of a wordsmith: a quiet shyness forced him not to dwell too much but to push on with the words toward the poetry of the naked image, which his minimal touch turned into reality. His “I—it-inme” circle opens and closes continually without ever becoming dense, accommodating a style that prefers to remain hidden. The prose on the page sheds light, though does not drag on the imperceptible lightness of the narrative. It flows between description of feeling (in Episodes, “the determined murderer left a trail of burned huts, of sullen sadness…”) and narrative accounts in which he searches for himself (in the Diaries, “Man, the measure of all things, speaks here through my mouth and narrates in my own language that which my eyes have seen”) and sometimes even seems to be watching us.
Che’s colorful prose paints objects as far as his eyes can see and often, if the landscape permits it, with an intimate touch:
The road snakes between the low foothills that sound the beginning of the great cordillera of the Andes, then descends steeply until it reaches an unattractive, miserable town, surrounded in sharp contrast by magnificent, densely wooded mountains.
The episode of the attempt to steal wine, and others in this cheeky tradition, contains precious pearls of diction:
The fact was, we were as broke as ever, retracing in our minds the smiles that had greeted my drunken antics, trying to find some trace of the irony with which we could identify the thief.
A sense of strangeness returns. In the chapter “Circular Exploration”: “As night fell it brought us a thousand strange noises and the sensation of walking into empty space with each step.” In Epis
odes: “Then, in the middle of the ambush, an eerie moment of silence arose. When we went to gather the dead after the initial shooting, there was no one on the highway…” The imagery is fairly bursting with both the abundance and the silence of the visual world:
The huge figure of a stag dashed like a quick breath across the stream and his body, silver by the light of the rising moon, disappeared into the undergrowth. This tremor of nature cut straight to our hearts. (The Motorcycle Diaries)
[Fidel’s] voice and presence in the woods, lit up by the torches, took on moving tones, and you could see that our leader changed the ideas of many people. (Episodes)
Though reference is made to Fidel’s voice and tone, the scene seems silent to us, as if it has been witnessed from afar.