Che - Motorcycle Diary

Before Che Guevara became a Marxist guerilla commander, before he
became a revolutionary icon emblazoned on T-shirts, before he was

even known as “Che,” there was a buddy, a bike and an epic road trip
that would change the course of his life and world history.
In December 1951, 23-year-old Argentine medical student Ernesto
Rafael Guevara de la Serna hopped on the back of his friend Alberto
Granado’s antiquated Norton 500cc motorcycle and sped out of
Cordoba, Argentina. “All we could see was the dust on the road ahead
and ourselves on the bike, devouring kilometers in our flight
northward,” Guevara wrote.
In spite of a six-year age difference, Guevara and Granado, a 29-year-

old biochemist, had been friends for nearly a decade. The duo shared
an intellectual curiosity and a hunger for adventure as they embarked
on an odyssey up the spine of South America.
The Making of a Revolutionary

Guevara’s social awareness had already begun to emerge during his
prior travels in Argentina and abroad, says Paulo Drinot, a professor of
Latin American history at University College London and editor ofChe’s
Travels: The Making of a Revolutionary in 1950s Latin America. “Che
grew up in an upper middle-class family that had hit on hard times, but it
was an intellectual environment that was clearly attentive to political
processes,” he says. “His interest in medicine as a career and
profession was in part an expression of his social consciousness, which
developed at an early age.”
After leaving Cordoba, the two friends visited the Argentine capital of
Buenos Aires and the seaside city of Miramar before crossing the
barren pampas and ascending into the Andes. Plagued by his chronic
asthma, Guevara had a rough start to the trip as he contracted the flu
and nursed a broken heart after receiving a break-up letter from his
girlfriend.
Granado’s motorcycle, nicknamed La Poderosa II (“the mighty one”),

suffered from its own ailments and failed to live up to its moniker before
finally breaking down for good in Chile. The road trippers were now
“bums without wheels,” as Guevara wrote. They forged northward,
however, through deserts and rainforests by hitching rides, walking,
riding horses and even stowing away on a ship. The pair slept in
garages, barns and police stations as well as under the stars.
Alberto Granado on the set of "The Motorcycle Diaries," a 2004 film

based on his ride with friend, Che Guevara.
The friends visited iconic locations such as Lake Titicaca and the ruins
of Machu Picchu, which Guevara called “the pure expression of the
most powerful indigenous race in the Americas.” They also visited
decidedly less touristy locations like the great copper mine in the
Chilean town of Chuquicamata that was operated by an American
multinational company. There, Guevara witnessed the exploitation of the
mine workers.
“The only thing that matters is the enthusiasm with which the workers
set to ruining their health in search of a few meager crumbs that barely
provide their subsistence,” he wrote. “The biggest effort Chile should
make is to shake its uncomfortable Yankee friend from its back, a task
that for the moment at least is Herculean.”
“The biggest effort Chile should make is to shake its uncomfortable

Yankee friend from its back, a task that for the moment at least is
Herculean.” - Che Guevara
In Peru, the two Argentines saw the wretched poverty endured by
indigenous people treated as second-class citizens. “These people who
watch us walk through the streets of the town are a defeated
race,” Guevara wrote. “Their stares are tame, almost fearful, and
completely indifferent to the outside world. Some give the impression
they go on living only because it’s a habit they cannot shake.”
After sailing on the Amazon River, Granado and Guevara spent two
weeks at a leper colony in eastern Peru where the humane treatment of
the 600 patients affirmed Granado’s desire to continue his work helping
those with leprosy. “The psychological lift it gives to these poor people—
treating them as normal human beings instead of animals, as they are
used to—is incalculable,” Guevara wrote.
The medical student’s travels made him more conscious of a common

South American civilization and awoke in him a pan-American vision.
“The division of America into unstable and illusionary nations is
completely fictional, we constitute a single mestizo race, which from
Mexico to the Magellan straits bears notable ethnographical
similarities,” he said at a birthday party thrown in his honor at the leper
colony. “And so, in an attempt to rid myself of the weight of small-
minded provincialism, I propose a toast to Peru and to a United Latin
America.”
Continuing their travels, the pair voyaged down the Amazon on a

wooden raft, christened Mambo-Tango, until they surrendered to the
swift currents and swarms of mosquitoes and took refuge in Leticia,
Colombia, for nine days where they trained a local soccer team, with the
future guerilla leader playing goalie.
Following a flight to Bogota on what Guevara called “a cocktail-shaker

of an airplane,” they traveled by bus and truck to Caracas, Venezuela,
where the pair separated. Granado began work at a local leprosy clinic
while his friend flew to Miami and spent three weeks in the United
States before returning home to Argentina after eight months away.
Guevara Joins Fidel Castro in Cuban

Revolution
The 8,000-mile trip from the Andes to the Amazon made an impact on
the young medical student by exposing him to social injustice, economic
inequality, capitalist exploitation and political repression. “I am not the
person I once was,” he wrote upon his return. “All this wandering around
‘Our America with a Capital A’ has changed me more than I thought.”
“Che’s politicization was in large part a product of his travels, first in

1951-52 and then, more so, a second trip that took him to Guatemala
and later Mexico,” Drinot says. “In part, this owed to his experience of
poverty and inequality in Latin America, and the ways he understood the
causes of both poverty and inequality.
At the same time, he met a number of left-wing political figures and also
non-left-wing political figures, and he generally was more impressed by
the former than the latter. Finally, he came to view the United States as
major factor in the problems that Latin America faced, and this led him
to align with left-wing Marxist views.”
After graduating from medical school, Guevara met Fidel Castro in

Mexico in 1954 and joined the Cuban Revolution. He never forgot his
friendship with Granado, however. At the guerilla leader’s invitation,
Granado moved to Cuba in 1961 and co-founded a medical school.
Guevara’s extended journal of the duo’s cross-continent trip was
published in the early 1990s and became the basis of the 2004 film “The
Motorcycle Diaries.”

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Before Che Guevara became a Marxist guerilla commander, before he

became a revolutionary icon emblazoned on T-shirts, before he was

In spite of a six-year age difference, Guevara and Granado, a 29-year-

The Making of a Revolutionary

Granado’s motorcycle, nicknamed La Poderosa II (“the mighty one”),

Alberto Granado on the set of "The Motorcycle Diaries," a 2004 film

“The biggest effort Chile should make is to shake its uncomfortable

The medical student’s travels made him more conscious of a common

Continuing their travels, the pair voyaged down the Amazon on a

Following a flight to Bogota on what Guevara called “a cocktail-shaker

Guevara Joins Fidel Castro in Cuban

“Che’s politicization was in large part a product of his travels, first in

After graduating from medical school, Guevara met Fidel Castro in

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