Ernesto Che Guevara

Ernesto Che Guevara was an Argentine Marxist revolutionary and physician whose The Motorcycle Diaries recounts the 1952 journey through South America that transformed his political consciousness and is considered a classic of travel literature.

Ernesto Guevara de la Serna — Che Guevara — was twenty-three years old in 1952 when he left Buenos Aires on a Norton motorcycle with his friend Alberto Granado and traveled eight thousand miles through Argentina, Chile, Peru, Colombia, and Venezuela. The Motorcycle Diaries, his account of that journey, was written from the diary he kept and was not published until 1993, long after his execution in Bolivia in 1967. It records the moment when a middle-class Argentine medical student became radicalized by direct exposure to the poverty, indigenous displacement, and political oppression of Latin America.

The book is not political writing in the conventional sense — it is travel writing, and often very good travel writing: attentive to landscape, character, and the specific textures of the places visited. The political consciousness it reveals is developing rather than formed: Guevara is observing and reacting rather than theorizing. The encounter with lepers in a Peruvian colony is the emotional climax of the book, the moment where his medical education and his growing political awareness converge.

The Motorcycle Diaries was adapted as a film by Walter Salles in 2004, with Gael García Bernal as Guevara. The film, like the book, focuses on the journey rather than the revolution that followed it, presenting Guevara before his legend rather than as his legend. The book is most interesting as a document of transformation: the formation of a consciousness that would go on to participate in the Cuban Revolution and attempt to replicate it across Africa and South America.