Review of The Motorcycle Diaries by Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara
Originally published on Goodreads on January 27th, 2023.
★★★★★
Guevara is a fantastic writer – there’s no doubt that his charisma was not solely a live quality. The diaries begin in anticipation and excitement and end in the weight of knowledge and the world on his young shoulders. In reading his thoughts, even edited, Guevara offers you an insight into himself, one that is not lionized or politicized but a fellow man with a desire to see and understand the world. With understanding though comes moral impetus and he does not shirk away from it like others more cowardly. It is this thoughtfulness and empathy in his writing that I admire so greatly, especially in consideration of the privilege he first necessarily and later willfully gave up in order to travel and lead.
What makes me sad comparing Guevara and his friend Alberto Granado’s travel with my own experiences is in comparison of hospitality. Their travels were marked by the spontaneity, amusement, and pitifulness of asking for hospitality. At some points they were so bold as to flat out ask a doctor at a hospital to buy their hungry selves a meal. It is a bit morally dicey considering the two of them have appropriately well-off backgrounds and chose a life of vagrancy for a period. But without fail, they are treated with complete and total hospitality, whether on the grounds they happened to be doctors, or Argentines, or hungry, or for the pure sake of it. I don’t think hospitality exists much more, especially in the Western world.
In the West, I might lay part of the blame on individualism and capitalism, but I think the answer is simpler – travel has become too ubiquitous and our understandings of each other have gone from rumors and myths to complete and total knowledge. Why should I offer a stranger a bed in my home when they can easily find a hotel or hostel room anywhere, or a meal when they can go to the grocery store and buy a sandwich? Outside of the West, the knowledge of the power dynamics between visitor and local make a delicate dance in which the question gets asked, why should you, the underprivileged, be asked to give me, possessor of unimaginable luxury, anything? For authenticity’s sake? For an ‘unforgettable experience’? Well those too are sold nowadays as well.
In the film adaptation, Guevara asks seeing the ruins of Machu Picchu, How is it possible to feel nostalgia for a world I never knew*? And reading his travelogues from this era I ask the same. Past all the systematic issues that have led to the ruin of widespread genuine hospitality, I think many of us today look at it with suspicion because it is taking without giving. But this mindset is wrong. The second character of my name in Mandarin, 钵 (bō), is the term for the bowl Buddhist monks use to beg for food. In begging, the monks offer to the people something – the ability to give. I wish one day we could return to a world in which people practice hospitality, because it offers so much to both the receiver and the giver.
But I have skirted around the real issue with demise of hospitality, which is there is no solidarity in much travel anymore between the traveller and their host. For the privileged Westerner, there is in every country either the aforementioned power discomfort or there is no reason to be offered hospitality for one has within their individual means the capability to get by. What I’m trying to say is that, I think hospitality is the fundamental instrument in the radicalization of Che Guevara, because in the hospitality of Latin America he found solidarity and in their recognition of the Pan-American brotherhood, he too came to recognize his own identity. And I might be a bit too moderate in my politics in even suggesting such a thing, but I see in this the clear existence of non-economic benefits of collectivism, and that is worthy of pursuit in itself.
*Interestingly, this phrase doesn’t exist in the textual Diaries. I’m curious as to whether it came from another journal of his, as the film does admit to covering more than just the textual Diaries, or if it was written solely for the film. On this note, despite the fact that the 2004 film adaptation and the text don’t differ substantially, I don’t think either supercedes the other. In both the spirit and ethos of Guevara, Granado, and their travels are captured with deep nostalgic sentimentality, powerful emotional reverberations, and the quiet contentment of purpose. I would like to thank Sra. Enseñat for introducing it to me.