Che’s Travels: The Making of a Revolutionary in 1950s Latin America (review)

This book edited by Paulo Drinot provides a new angle on one of the most charismatic and iconic revolutionary figures in 20th-century Latin America, Ernesto “Che” Guevara. Drinot introduces eight essays covering different countries visited by Guevara during his two early 1950s travels through Latin America, before his participation in the Cuban revolution. The authors, all historians and specialists on the countries they write about, use his travelogues as their analytical tool to explore three main themes: the societies Guevara encountered in his travels, how he represented those societies, and his legacy in each of these countries later in the 1960s and beyond. Those themes provide the framework for analyzing “how Guevara’s Latin America produced Che and how Che simultaneously produced Latin America through his travelogues,” as well as “how Latin America has reproduced Che by examining the various roles assigned to him and the claims made on him by various actors.” (2)

The result is an attractive book that follows Guevara in his errands across the continent. Written in a clear and engaging manner, the essays locate Guevara’s observations in his diaries within broader historiographical and historical frameworks. Indeed, one of the book’s achievements is its appeal for a wider audience. While more general readers may be interested in the personal details of his travels and the sense of intimacy they convey about one important historical figure, historians and social scientists can engage with several of the themes advanced by the authors.

In particular, the book brings us to Latin America’s turbulent 1950s, a critical decade that, as Drinot rightly argues in the introduction, has not received the same degree of attention from scholars as previous or subsequent decades. The authors show Guevara traveling through countries that were reaping the results of major social, political, and economic changes unleashed since the 1930s and that prelude the violent upheaval that afflicted the region in the 1960s and 1970s. Eduardo Elena convincingly locates the origins of Che’s travels within the mass tourism and nationalist ideas of Juan Perón’s Argentina, while Patience Schell shows how Chile was experiencing significant changes such as the increasing participation of women in labour and politics. In Venezuela and Chile respectively, Judith Ewell and Eric Zolov describe Che stepping into societies undergoing rapid urbanization and capitalist development. Ewell, Drinot, and Malcolm Deas analyze his arrival to Venezuela, Peru, and Colombia during repressive political regimes while Anna Zulawski and Cindy Forster show him in Bolivia and Guatemala during revolutionary periods. The rising power of the United States in the emerging Cold War clearly appears in the counterrevolutionary administration of Miguel Alemán in Mexico and, more dramatically, in the cia-backed coup in Guatemala that deeply impacted the Argentine traveler.

The essays thus provide excellent and updated accounts of the societies visited by Guevara, opening the way for a discussion of how he represented these societies and how they impacted him. While Walter Salles’s 2004 movie, The Motorcycle Diaries, popularized Guevara’s first trip in the 1950s as a journey of self-discovery at the personal and ideological levels, from young Ernesto to revolutionary Che, the travelogues analyzed by the different authors reveal a more complicated, far less hagiographical picture – and, for that reason, a much more human and compelling perspective. In fact, several essays reveal that Guevara usually depicted the different societies through the lens of a young and arrogant Argentine who, despite his efforts to differentiate himself from what he considered ordinary tourists, more than frequently resorted to middle-class sensibilities and crude racist and sexist stereotypes. Moreover, Guevara only glimpsed the social changes that were transforming Chile, made scant comment on the political situation in Peru, and paid very little attention to the 1952 revolution in Bolivia, while his Venezuelan experience “did not obviously contribute to the evolution of his political thinking.” (150) His political awareness and radicalization were more decisively awakened and...