After struggling with Borges and a short stories by contemporary women writers from Argentina, I decided to re-read one of my favorite books "Motorcycle Diaries" by none other than Che! I watched the movie when it first came out and since then have watched it so many times thanks to Netflix and have read the book many times and still I dont get tired of it.
Whether you like or dislike the Che that we all know, one cannot but love the Che in Motorcycle Diaries! This was when he was Ernesto and had not yet discovered the Che in him. I find the book to be very moving, very honest (unlike the movie, which gave into some of the Che cult - making him more of a hero than he was at that time) and simply beautiful and poignant prose about the landscape and the people.
And as you read the book you can see the gradual transformation from a wheezing asthmatic doctor who could barely dance, into a man of conviction, with absolute honesty and resoluteness - the characteristics that the world remembers him for today. As Alberto Granado said he stopped being an institutional doctor and became a doctor of the people or as Eduardo Galeano said "from solitude to solidarity,..."I" turned into "we".
In this day of raging healthcare debate, what is fairness, what is affordable healthcare, Che's lessons from the road ring true and something that we all need to pay attention to. His meeting with the old asthmatic woman in La Gioconda was especially moving when he sees the loss of dignity that accompanies ill health and having no access to simple medical treatment.
A couple of other things that stand out are his understanding of the state of indigenous people, and coming to grips with poverty. Numerous pages are dedicated to the overwhelming sense of hunger that the two adventurers experienced in their travel. I can clearly see how all these experiences shaped Che's future and his anti-consumerist stance.
One thing we've all heard about Che is his absolute honesty, and the book is a testimony to that. There is no intention to portray himself as a hero! In fact most of the resourcefulness comes from Alberto. Here is a guy who has failed in love, physically weak, can't dance, and relies on kindness of strangers to get him through his journey.
He opens his journal by saying "This is not a story of heroic feats, or merely the narrative of a cynic......In nine months of a man's life he can think a lot of things, from the loftiest meditations on philosophy to the most desperate longing for a bowl of soup.... All this wandering around Our America with a capital A has changed me more than i thought"
All of us at some point dream of taking off on a motorcycle and traveling around the world. Very few of us do and of those very few learn from their experience and of those an even smaller minority start a revolution! Che definitely belonged to that minority.
Whether you are a progressive, liberal, marxist, communist, socialist, conservative, capitalist, the Che on the Motorcycle will appeal to you for sure!
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