The Motorcycle Diaries Made Revolution a Pop Culture Product

Ernesto Guevara de la Serna’s account of the arduous trip he took with his friend Alberto Granado in 1952 is one of the great literary testaments to the transformational power of travel. This is true whatever one thinks of where the journey ended up. Among other things, the trek from Argentina to Venezuela, recounted romantically yet melancholically in The Motorcycle Diaries, imbued the 23-year-old med student with “a healthy respect for distances”—a valuable takeaway considering that the revolutionary insurgency in which he took part would ultimately traverse more than 500 miles. By then, of course, the young man whose musings formed the basis of the Diaries was more widely known as “Che” Guevara.

Published posthumously in 1993 as Notas de Viaje and then for the first time in English by Verso in 1995, The Motorcycle Diaries presented a distinctive portrait of the revolutionary as a young man. During the Cold War, the Western media often presented Che as the cold, calculating driver of Cuba’s postrevolutionary policy framework. As Time magazine put it in its 1960 cover story on Che, the Argentine was “the most fascinating, and the most dangerous, member of the triumvirate” that included Fidel—“the heart, soul, voice and bearded visage of present-day Cuba”—and Raúl Castro—“the fist that holds the revolution’s dagger.” Che was “the brain,” the author of Guerrilla Warfare, his (in)famous 1961 how-to guide for aspiring radicals.

Here instead was a softer, more sensitive, less certain Che, the handsome rogue who became a pop icon almost as much as a political one. Whereas Guerrilla Warfare is practical, at times even clinical, The Motorcycle Diaries showed a more approachable Che: a young man on a political trajectory that so many followed in the 1950s and 1960s. If Che had not later taken up arms, his memoir might simply have been a kind of genre curiosity, a Latin American expression of the same generational restlessness Jack Kerouac reported. (Notably, in fact, the director of the film The Motorcycle Diaries would later adapt On the Road.) His diary entries reveal obvious literary pretensions. (“The full moon is silhouetted against the sea, smothering the waves with silver reflections,” he writes.) At other points, he acknowledges that, “hot and fresh with enthusiasm,” he wrote “some things that were perhaps a little flashy and somewhat removed from the spirit of scientific inquiry.”

The intermingling of earnestness and world-weariness is a hallmark feature of the diary, likely a product of a certain self-consciousness on his part. After all, Che took the journey he recounts in the Diaries basically for fun. “The nineteenth-century European aristocrats who headed to Florence or Venice did so because it was expected of their ilk, a part of their ‘education,’” Paulo Drinot, a historian who has written and taught extensively about Che, told me. By contrast, “Guevara sets out with no particular destination but with an idea of adventure, of breaking convention, of doing something for the hell of it.”

If the softer Che made the diaries such a hit in the 1990s, what stands out today is how hard-fought its optimism is—how much effort must sustain its conviction that a better world is possible. The reader of Che’s diary knows the young narrator’s fate. We know what time will do to him and what he will do with his time. We know his “resolutely bohemian ways” will harden into martial discipline. We know that Che will enter history for the leadership role he assumed in the Cuban Revolution and in the revolutionary government that followed but also that thousands across the region and the world would likewise follow their conscience into armed struggle. We know that thousands will perish as he did at the hands of counterinsurgent forces. 

The Motorcycle Diaries describes an awakening that will be familiar to many who have come to question the status quo in some way. Like the famous image of Che emblazoned on so many posters, T-shirts, mugs, and other merchandise, “the diaries have become key cultural artefacts,” representing not just the Latin American left but “Latin American culture more generally,” Drinot pointed out to me. “In some ways,” he continued, Che’s image was later used to invoke “a more banal personal revolution.” The publication of the Diaries and its film adaptation played into this, shaping “how the diaries were sold to a global audience: ‘Easy Rider meets Das Kapital’ is how the London Times described the book.” Often implicit in such presentations of the Diaries is the appeal to a particular kind of masculinity, one committed to a cause at the expense of deep familial bonds.

The character in the memoir is not the revolutionary leader and is therefore unburdened by the messy moral questions of violent insurrection. Conservative critics of the film decried this fact, accusing it of defanging Che and presenting him as a cuddly, attractive rebel with strong opinions but a good heart. The purportedly fatal flaw of the film’s romantic arc was its failure to inform audiences of Che’s future bloodlust and authoritarianism. This critique misses the point of the film and the memoir on which it was based. 

The book’s publication decades after Che became a revolutionary icon should certainly prompt readers to engage the work critically. But The Motorcycle Diaries is immensely valuable for scholars across various disciplines because it is not the screed its critics seem to think it is. For scholars of Latin American studies, the book serves as a window into the region’s social, political, and economic realities in the postwar period. It is part of any good reading list on the Latin American left, anti-imperialism, and the region’s ongoing struggle for social justice.

Born into an upper-middle-income family in Rosario, Argentina, Che was part of a class and a generation primed to benefit disproportionately from a postwar boom. Democratization, urbanization, and industrialization were the auspicious orders of the day, promising to lift the region out of instability and poverty. Over the course of the trip, however, Che encounters some of the millions untouched by the new affluence. For many on the outskirts of urban centers, progress yielded very little, to say nothing of those living in the remote countryside. “The panorama of healthcare in Chile leaves a lot to be desired (although I realized later it was by far superior to that in other countries I got to know),” Che observes about halfway through his diary.

The distance between the promise of postwar prosperity and the reality of widespread social exclusion radicalized young middle-class men and women frustrated by the world they were inheriting. Workers and peasants, drawing from very different experiences, also embraced new political vocabularies. At one point, Che and Granado meet a persecuted, emaciated couple of self-described Communists. In reaction to the husband, Che articulates arguably the book’s sharpest insight. The man’s communism, he understands, was “a natural longing for something better”:

a protest against persistent hunger transformed into a love of this strange doctrine, whose essence he could never grasp but whose translations, “bread for the poor,” was something which he understood and, more importantly, filled him with hope.

For so many during the Cold War in Latin America and beyond, communism was a language of defiance for the dispossessed far more than a rigid subservience to Soviet imperatives. Che understood this in a way that most U.S. analysts never did.

The encounters Che describes become more than mere travel anecdotes; they spark a fire within him, prompting him to critically analyze the social and political structures that perpetuate the disparities that so shock him. After reading the Diaries, the sensitive reader might be prompted to examine his own surroundings. Who is being left behind today, and how have existing institutions failed them? How should we gauge the quality of a democracy that abides such needless suffering? The end of the diary distills Che’s urgent revelation brought on by his odyssey alongside Granado:

I see myself, immolated in the genuine revolution, the great equalizer of individual will, proclaiming the ultimate mea culpa. I feel my nostrils dilate, savoring the acrid smell of gunpowder and blood, the enemy’s death; I steel my body, ready to do battle, and prepare myself to be a sacred space within which the bestial howl of the triumphant proletariat can resound with new energy and new hope.

Through it all, that is what stands out from the Diaries today: energy and hope—the adamant belief in a world remade.

In 2011, as the Arab Spring bloomed, a former Hillary Clinton adviser asserted that “the Che Guevara of the 21st century is the network,” referring to the apparent power of the internet to disrupt despotic regimes everywhere. But Che the armed insurrectionist was eventually captured and executed, his final wish being only to “die with a full stomach.” The kind of online political organizing that a decade ago struck fear into the powerful appears also to have been brought to heel. The moment is one of political uncertainty, astronomical wealth, and profound inequality. As he experienced such circumstances seven decades ago, Ernesto Guevara de la Serna possessed few of the certainties he would later espouse as Che. More than for advice on guerrilla warfare, it is for humility, righteous indignation, openness, curiosity, and, yes, solidarity that readers today should examine Che’s early writings. They will find all that and more in The Motorcycle Diaries.