The Motorcycle Diaries: Notes on a Latin American Journey, and: Che Guevara Reader (review)

The production of books, articles, clothing, accessories, posters, photographs, documentaries, and feature films about revolutionary Che Guevara remains as profitable in communist Cuba as it does in the capitalist west. These two books form part of a collaborative project between Ocean Press and the Che Guevara Studies Center in Havana to respond to a global demand for the works and ideas of Che Guevara. Most of the entries in these two editions have long been available. Scholars will find greater significance in the fact of their publication than in the contents of their pages.

With the 2004 release of The Motorcycle Diariesas a major motion picture produced by Robert Redford and directed by Walter Salles, professors might be tempted to dispense with the book altogether and use the more attractive film version, which is fairly true to Guevara's diary. However, professors should not ignore the brief text and the minor academic controversy that it and the film generated. The young Ernesto Guevara depicted in print and film has been compared to James Dean and Jack Kerouac. Cinto Vitier, in his preface to The Motorcycle Diaries, compares the travelogue to José Martí's campaign diary and even Don Quixote. Vitier sees in Guevara's account "precious pearls of diction," "colorful prose," and "nimble freshness." Although literary critics and historians, knowing who this young Argentine becomes, will be sorely tempted to read much into this account of a South American journey, they should exercise caution. While Guevara contributes valuable descriptions of South American people and places in 1952, he does not describe any political epiphany or self-discovery in prose that should evoke comparisons to Martí or Shakespeare.

There are, nevertheless, legitimate reasons to study Guevara's travelogue carefully, for it has spawned a serious debate among his biographers. Jean Cormier attached great significance to Guevara's encounter with a poor married couple near the mining center of Chuquicamata, Chile, in March 1952. As Guevara described an evening spent with these two people, who happened to be communists: "They had not one single miserable blanket to cover themselves with, so we gave them one of ours and Alberto and I wrapped the other around us as best we could. It was one of the coldest times in my life, but also one which made me feel a little more brotherly toward this strange, for me anyway, human species" (78). According to Cormier, this cold night in northern Chile marked the beginnings of Ernesto's political transformation. From that time on, Cormier argues, Ernesto was "in a state of revolutionary incubation." Biographer Jorge Castañeda disputes the significance of Guevara's Chuquicamata experience, asserting that nothing in his diaries reflected the beginnings of any political transformation. Jon Lee Anderson devotes more space, and hence respect, to Guevara's meeting with the Chilean communists, and it receives good play in the film version as well.

Because we all know who Guevara becomes, we are all enchanted by the possibility that some dramatic event in his youth sparked a revolutionary commitment in a man who had been training to enter the Argentine bourgeoisie as a medical doctor. We must not dismiss the possibility that no single event on this South American journey shook Guevara out of his political indifference. Guevara's political development certainly intensified as a result of this South American journey, but he does not describe one epiphany. The journey as a whole moved Guevara closer toward a revolutionary commitment, a conclusion that Guevara himself reached sometime after his trip. After he returned to Buenos Aires, Guevara rewrote his travel diary as a narrative document and added an epilogue titled "Notes on the Margin." In this brief passage, without mentioning any time, place, or people, Guevara described his political activation as the result of a strange meeting with an unidentified man who predicted that Guevara...