A
Journey Around South America
By
Che Guevara
Fourth Estate, London 1996 Pages 155 Price £5.99
For many, this introduction may not be necessary, yet, for those whose response to "This book is recounts Che’s adventures" is met with a blank awe, the author of the book under review has to be introduced. Ernesto Che Guevara was born in Argentina in 1928. After fighting alongside Fidel Castro in the 3 years of guerrilla war in Cuba he became the Minister for Industries after the victory of the Cuban Revolution. In 1966, he established a guerrilla base in Bolivia where he was captured and killed in 1967. Che became a legend in his lifetime, a symbol of Latin American solidarity and an iconic hero of the radical sixties.
For those who have known Che for his books like The Guerilla Warfare, The Motorcycle Diaries come as a pleasant surprise. These diaries were written in 1951-52 and recount the journey that Che undertook with his friend and specialist in leprosy Alberto Granado across the South America on a Norton 500 cc motorbike. Che was 23 then.
Undertaken in his final year at medical school, the journey started from Argentina and took them through Chile, Peru, Colombia and finally to Venezuela. Undertaken after a long period of preparation when he finished with as many exams as he could while an old motorbike was improvised and the paperwork and visas- ‘those hurdles modern nations put in the way of would- be travellers’ obtained. Money, that eternal fiend and enemy of all adventurers was, of course, always a cause for worry. There is, at a number of places a boyish urge and a laddish instinct for improvisations- though not always ‘politically correct’.
Che is candid and unabashed as he recounts his escapades and misadventures. He kills the pet dog of a kindly couple- which has agreed to put up Che and Alberto in their house- mistaking the dog to be a mountain cat, the puma. "Two luminous eyes stared at me from the shadow of the trees. They sprang forward like a pouncing cat, while the black mass of the body slid over the door. At was instinctive, the brakes of intelligence failed and my instinct for self- preservation pulled the trigger". Not exactly flattering for a man who was to become the idol of the militant left in a few years, but which 23 year old, fed on stories of the puma cat in the jungles around him, not done the same?
Though more in the nature of a narrative, the diaries are peppered with insights into the continent which Che, like the other great revolutionary Simon Bolivar, believed of being essentially one. Equally notable is the sensitivity that Che displays to the people around him. For the brief time that Che and Alberto spend with the inmates of a leprosy hospital, they establish a rapport that is touching. ‘Although it was very simple, one of the things which affected us most in Lima was the send- off we received from the hospitals inmates. They collected 100.50 soles (the local currency),, which they presented to us with a very grandiloquent letter. Afterwards, some of them came up personally and some of them had tears in their eyes, spending time with them accepting their presents, sitting listening to football on the radio with them. If anything were to make us seriously specialize in leprosy, it would be the affection of the patients’.
Equally touching is the description of a working class couple in the copper mines of Chuquicamata. ‘In the light of a candle, drinking maté (a local drink) and eating a piece of bread and cheese, the man’s shrunken features stuck a mysterious, tragic note. In simple but expressive language, he told us about his three months in prison, his starving wife, and his children left in the care of a kindly neighbor, his fruitless pilgrimage in search of work and his comrades, who had mysteriously disappeared and were said to somewhere at the bottom of the sea’. These copper mines - ‘ spiced with the lives of poor unsung heroes of this battle, who die miserable deaths, when all they want is to earn is their daily bread’- produce 20 percent of all the world’s copper and ‘an economicopolitical battle is being waged in Chile between a coalition of nationalist and left- wing groupings which advocate nationalizing the mines and those, who in the cause of free- enterprise prefer a well- run mine (even in the foreign hands) to a possible less efficient management by the state’.
Che’s keen eyes also essays the depredations and the defeatism of the local natives (the Indians), who often eye him (Che was white) with suspicion. His descriptions of Machu Picchu are evocative, his observations on the Spanish conquistador sarcastic, his descriptions of the ancient ruins often poetic- ‘gold doesn’t have the same quiet dignity as silver which acquires new charm as it ages’.
So true, Che. So true about you too.
Bhupinder (bhupi@mail.com)
The Tribune 16 Feb 1997
