Celebrating its 20th anniversary this year, “The Motorcycle Diaries“ is based on Che Guevara’s journey across South America in 1951, often cited as his awakening to the realities of poverty, social injustice and inequality.
“I knew that, in order to understand the world, I had to see it for myself,” a young Ernesto “Che” Guevara wrote in his diary.
At 23 years old, Guevara embarked on a road trip across South America with his best friend Alberto Granado, 29, on a dilapidated 1939 Norton motorcycle. Starting in 1951 and lasting until 1952, their road trip started in Buenos Aires, traveling across Chile, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela and Panama. All in all, the duo traveled over 14,000 kilometers.
This road trip is often cited as a crucial part of Guevara’s awakening from a medical student to hero- revolutionary (or criminal if you were on the imperialist side), shaping his views of the world, socialism, poverty, politics and Latin America.
Road trip movies are often about family, friendship, coming of age, adventure and self-discovery. ‘The Motorcycle Diaries’ is that rare movie about social awakening that would impact an entire continent.
I recently revisited this movie and felt now as I did 20 years ago: this may very well be the best road trip film ever made.
Road trip movies are often about family (Little Miss Sunshine; Planes, Trains and Automobiles); friendship (Sideways); coming of age (Almost Famous); adventure and misadventure (The Hangover; Nomadland; We’re the Millers); and self-discovery (Eat, Pray Love; Under the Tuscan Sun).
Rarely are they about social awakening. A more recent, notable exception is the 2018 film The Green Book, also based on a true story and a real guidebook for travelers in the segregated southern United States in the 1960s. While this film ends with friendship, The Motorcycle Diaries ends with the beginnings of Che Guevara as the world would know him.
Guevara is considered a pivotal figure in the Cuban revolution; he also led the guerrilla groups in Bolivia, where he was killed in 1967 by the national army aided by the CIA. In his lifetime he was a Marxist, a hero to the leftists, a criminal to sitting presidents, author, physician, guerrilla leader, and a minister after the Cuban Revolution that installed Fidel Castro as prime minister.
Based on Guevara’s actual diaries during his travels, his book The Motorcycle Diaries: Notes on a Latin American Journey was published posthumously in 2003. It is this book that became the basis of the 2004 film The Motorcycle Diaries, which premiered at Sundance Film Festival to critical reception.
The film was directed by Walter Salles with the screenplay by José Rivera. Gael García Bernal (Y Tu Mamá También) plays Ernesto “Che” Guevara, for which he won Best Actor at Cannes Film Festival. Rodrigo de la Serna (Money Heist) plays his best friend Alberto Granado; De la Serna won a BAFTA Best Supporting Actor for his role.
“We were working with a very large theme—how does consciousness grow with experience? And how the road, specifically, contributes to that growth,” Salles said at the Austin Film Festival.
A road trip, an awakening
Director Salle said that Guevara’s diaries were not just travel notes, but “reflections of a young man grappling with the realities of life and society.”
A year into their adventure, Guevara and Granado find themselves broke in Chile, where they are fed by two sisters (Guevara has a string of flings along the way). They say goodbye to their broken-down motorcycle “La Poderosa” (the Powerful One) and begin hitchhiking across South America.
I love that quick cutaway where they are sitting with the driver on his truck, picking their favorite poets. Federico García Lorca, says one. No, Neruda! says Guevera.
Around a campfire with miners one night, a couple tells them that their farm was seized by a land speculator who forced them out. They had to leave their son with their family to find work and avoid being jailed.
“That’s what they call progress,” the wife says. “Are you two looking for work?”
“No, we are not looking for work,” Guevara answers.
“Then why are you traveling?”
Actor Gael García Bernal’s face is a perfect mix of confusion and shame, as if it never occurred to him that people travel out of necessity, not enjoyment. With a hint of embarrassment, he answers, “We travel for the sake of travel.”
Guevara narrates over the dwindling fire: Their faces were tragic and haunting. They told us of comrades who had mysteriously disappeared, and were said to be somewhere at the bottom of the sea. It was one of the coldest nights of my life, but one which also made me feel closer to this strange, for me anyway, human race.
As they pass through the Andes, a mountain range that stretches over several Latin American countries, on the Peruvian side they see more indigenous people. Cuzco was the capital before the “Spanish trashed it” and moved it to Lima.
Here, the duo spend time with the Quechua people, descendants of the Inca civilization. Their stories are heartbreakingly the same as in Chile. They have no money; farmers are kicked out of their properties by rich businessmen who bring in the police to force them out.
It was a road trip that changed Guevara as a 23-year-old, and by the time he was captured and killed at only 39 years old, he had changed South America too.
On April 5, 1952, they reach Machu Picchu. The ancient Incan city and religious site is empty except for the two young men. Guevera scribbles on his diary: The Incas knew about astronomy, medicine, mathematics among other things, but the Spanish had gunpowder. What would America look like today if things had been different? How is it possible to feel nostalgia for a world I never knew?
Looking over the ruins of the city abandoned after the Spanish conquest, he narrates, How is it possible for a civilization that built this be destroyed….to build this?
From the air, we see the sprawling Peruvian capital city. They have arrived in Lima. It is May 12, 1952.
The lepers of Santa Isabel
From Pucallpa, they sail on the Amazon River to volunteer at the leper colony of Santa Isabel. Guevara only has a semester to go in Argentina before he completes his medical degree while Granado, six years older, is a biochemist.
On June 8, 1952, they arrive on the island. The Amazon River cuts the colony in two halves: the 600 patients live on the north side, the doctors and nuns on the south side.
Though they are told to wear gloves, the two don’t; instead they shake hands with the first two lepers with bare hands, surprising them with the gesture. Many of the patients are amputated or deformed. Other than that, the lepers lead normal lives, shielded as it were from land-grabbing businessmen and corrupt politicians. They build their own houses here, they farm, they raise livestock.
But the ravages of the disease are hard to accept. “You’re wasting your time. Life is pain,” a patient tells Guevera.
“You’ve got to fight for every breath and tell death to go to hell,” he answers.
In their three weeks at the colony, the two young men become friends with the patients and staff. Guevara recognizes the humanity, the dignity of patients who have lost limbs and the doctors and nuns who care for them.
On the eve of their departure from Sta. Isabel, Guevara turns 24. At the humble party they throw for him, he thanks them and adds, “This journey has confirmed [my] belief that the division of America into unstable and illusory nations is a complete fiction. We are one mestizo race, from Mexico to the Magellan Straits. And so, in an attempt to free ourselves from narrow-minded provincialism. I propose a toast to Peru and to a united America.”
As Ernesto “Che” Guevera leaves his best friend Alberto Granado to go back to Argentina, he says, “All this time we spent on the road, something happened.”
He narrates as his plane takes off: This isn’t a tale of heroic feats. It’s about two lives running parallel for a while, with common aspirations and similar dreams. Wandering around our America has changed me. I am not me anymore, or least I am not the same me I was.
Guevara’s dream of an independent, united Latin America never came true—the continent would remain 12 sovereign states—but from this road trip he formed the idea that the enemy was not each other but imperialism, whether it was colonial, economic or cultural.
It was a road trip that changed him as a 23-year-old, and by the time he was captured and killed at only 39 years old, Guevara had changed South America too.
