The Motorcycle Diaries Review

Read :
It's my hope that you read the novel before this review. It's a good book - especially considering what else you may be reading in a Latin American class. I also recommend the somewhat recently-made movie, which is in Spanish but hilarious even with the sub-titles.

The Motorcycle Diaries Review

Authored by Ernesto Guevara-soon to become 'Che' Guevara-The Motorcycle Diaries is a collection of notes, journal entries, and letters written on the young man's journey through South America with his friend and colleague, Alberto Granado. In the book, Guevara is exposed to a decrepit society wherein the poor and working classes, among them miners of the Chuquicamata copper mine, lepers, and members of the outlawed communist party, are unjustly treated by their upper class governments. This trip would prove pivotal to shaping Guevara into a symbolic Marxist Revolutionary.

On seemingly a whim, Guevara, a 23-year-old medical student, and his friend Alberto, six years senior and a biochemist, decide to travel on a road trip through South America on La Poderosa II ('The Great One'), their unreliable motorcycle. Route planned, they set out-arriving in Buenos Aires, Argentina, during late December. Soon a fresh year would dawn. With it, too, the realization of just how massive their journey was: pushing 8000 miles in nine months, nearly one thousand miles a month. This didn't seem to dissuade their enthusiasm. Drinking mate, a tea-like beverage, nearly every leg of the trip to boost their spirits, the pair travels from Argentina to Chile through the Andes Mountains and Patagonia, living, whenever they could, off the hospitality of the natives of this part of the world. It was in no short supply. La Poderosa II's death soon saw them as regular hitchhikers, even more reliant on others than before; though, it's an amazing thing, how different Latin Americans are when compared to their North American counter-parts. There was rarely short supply of rides, even if many were in the back of a farmer's truck shared with Indians or cattle. An article written on the pair in Temuco ever prodded the goodwill of strangers; meals and spare rooms, too, came easy.

Guevara and his comrade were both experts on Leprosy. Upon arriving in Valparaiso, they looked forward to traveling to Easter Island, where a leper colony had been founded. Unfortunately, no ships would be departing for a year's time. Undaunted they proved their boldness-stalking a suitable docked ship, before stowing away in an officer's bathroom. Not the most thought-out plan; the room's toilet was clogged and both were sick before long. Presenting themselves to the captain, their fare was manual labor. They escaped to Antofagasta, then, the mines of Chuquicamata, witnessing first-hand the insufferable working conditions of the miners. With Peru, in the cities of Tarata and others, came the lingering sadness of the Incas, more prominent, there, than the earlier half of their journey. They were a beaten people. Guevara abhors their treatment by the Peruvians, who seemed to view them as objects, allowed to live, but little more. Alberto starts a fight with officers harassing an Indian woman bringing food to her jailed husband, and the two are forced to flee.

Their final leg of the journey takes the two rafting through the Amazon, then, to Colombia and Venezuela, where they separate and Guevara travels back to the US. But the most interesting adventure towards the end lies not in these locations, but the end of their stay in San Pablo, Peru. It is here that the last of several eye-opening events affect Guevara.

The first occurred in Valparaiso, where he attempted to treat an old, haggard woman with asthma, a condition he himself possessed. Out of work, with no health care or money to provide medicine, she could only sit, wheezing, until the day death mercifully took her. Later, Guevara meets a persecuted Communist couple outside Chuquicamata. He sympathizes with them. They only wished to pursue a better way of life and had been repressed for it, as 'communist vermin'; their political party banned by the Chilean president. The miners of Chuquicamata toiled fruitlessly under their 'Yankee bosses', risking their lives for what little pay and benefits they received. The mine's many graveyards littered the mountain. In Peru, the defeated Incas lived in filth. He watched the Indians, at one point, from the vantage point of his train. Feces caked them. Others treated them like trash, or cattle-much moreso the former.

Finally came San Pablo. Here Guevara and Alberto visited a leper colony deep in the jungle, of around 600 souls. This was, in fact, the second leper colony they visited during their trip, and only of marginal better condition. The two worked with patients and practiced their medicinal art, all the while without gloves or coverings with which these people were used to. They'd been avoided, neglected, treated like anything but humans, save by the two kind doctors. Their gratitude did more than humble the Guevara. It helped, along with these other events, to open his eyes.

The books ends with a chilling declaration by Guevara. He had witnessed first-hand the oppression of the people by those rich and wealthy; the poverty, famine, and inhuman prejudice by which mankind treated its kin. This conclusion resounds in one of the man's most famous quotes: "I knew that when the great guiding spirit cleaves humanity into two antagonistic halves, I will be with the people." Now 'Che' Guevara, as his revolutionaries would come to nickname him, the man would grow to become one of the most profound figures of Marxism, and revolution, in history.