The Motorcycle Diaries: Notes on a Latin American Journey

By Ernesto Che Guevara, Walter Salles, Cintio Vitier and Aleida Guevara

A New York Times bestseller
With a new introduction by The Motorcyle Diaries filmmaker Walter Salles, and featuring 24 pages of photos taken by Che.

The Motorcycle Diaries is Che Guevara's diary of his journey to discover the continent of Latin America while still a medical student, setting out in 1952 on a vintage Norton motorcycle together with his friend Alberto Granado, a biochemist. It captures, arguably as much as any book ever written, the exuberance and joy of one person's youthful belief in the possibilities of humankind tending towards justice, peace and happiness.

After the release in 2004 of the exhilarating film of the same title, directed by Walter Salles, the book became a New York Times and international bestseller.

This edition includes a new introduction by Walter Salles and an array of new material that was assembled for the 2004 edition coinciding with the release of the film, including 24 pages of previously unpublished photos taken by Che, notes and comments by his wife, Aleida Guevara March, and an extensive introduction by the distinguished Cuban author, Cintio Vitier.


"A journey, a number of journeys. Ernesto Guevara in search of adventure, Ernesto Guevara in search of America, Ernesto Guevara in search of Che. On this journey, solitude found solidarity. 'I' turned into 'we.'"—Eduardo Galeano

"As his journey progresses, Guevara's voice seems to deepen, to darken, colored by what he witnesses in his travels. He is still poetic, but now he comments on what he sees, though still poetically, with a new awareness of the social and political ramifications of what's going on around him."—January Magazine

"Our film is about a young man, Che, falling in love with a continent and finding his place in it."
—Walter Salles, director of the film version of The Motorcycle Diaries

"All this wandering around 'Our America with a Capital A' has changed me more than I thought."
—Ernesto Che Guevara, from The Motorcycle Diaries

• Language: English
• Publisher: Seven Stories Press
• Release date: Nov 9, 2021
• ISBN: 9781644210697

Ernesto Che Guevara

Ernesto Che Guevara was a doctor and communist figure in the Cuban Revolution who went on to become a guerrilla leader in South America. He was born in Argentina. Guevara became part of Fidel Castro’s efforts to overthrow the Batista government in Cuba. He served as a military advisor to Castro and led guerrilla troops in battles against Batista forces. Executed by the Bolivian army in 1967, he has since been regarded as a martyred hero by generations of leftists worldwide. Guevara’s image remains a prevalent icon of leftist radicalism and anti-imperialism.

Book preview

CINTIO VITIER

introduction to the 1993 edition

If there is one hero in Latin America’s struggle for liberation—stretching from Bolívar’s¹ time until our own—who has attracted young people from Latin America and from all over the world, that hero is Ernesto Che Guevara. And though since his death he has become a modern myth, he has not yet been stripped of his youthful vitality. To the contrary, his mythic status has only served to heighten his youthfulness which, together with his daring and his purity, seem to constitute the secret essence of his charisma.

Becoming a myth, a symbol of so many scattered and fiercely held hopes, presupposes that such a character possesses a kind of gravity, a certain solemnity. It is good that this is so; historic utopia needs faces to embody it. But we shouldn’t lose sight of the everyday nature of those human beings, who were children, teenagers and young people before they acquired the skills by which to guide us. It is not that I want to bury their exceptional natures in the common or familiar aspects of their lives, but that knowledge of those first, formative stages shows us the starting point for their later trajectories.

This is especially true in Che’s case, whose account of this first trip he made with his friend Alberto Granado offers the young at heart such a close and cheerful, serious and at the same time ironic image of the young man, that we can almost glimpse his smile and hear his voice and asthmatic wheeze. He is young, like them, and he filled his whole life with youthfulness and matured his youth without diluting it.

This edition of The Motorcycle Diaries, the notes describing a journey made without hesitation, aboard the noisy motorcycle La Poderosa II (which gave out halfway, but only after transmitting to the adventure a joyous impulse we, too, receive), free as the wind, with the sole purpose of getting to know the world, is dedicated to people whose youth is not merely sequential, but wholehearted and spiritual.

In the first pages, the young man who would become one of the genuine heroes of the 20th century cautions us, This is not a story of heroic feats. The word heroic rings out above the others, because we cannot read these pages without thinking of Che’s future, an image of him in the Sierra Maestra, an image which reached perfection at Quebrada del Yuro in Bolivia.²

If this youthful adventure had not been prelude to his revolutionary formation, these pages would be different, and we would read them differently, though we cannot imagine how. Simply knowing that they are Che’s—though he wrote them before becoming Che—makes us believe that he had a presentiment regarding the way they should be read. For example:

The person who wrote these notes passed away the moment his feet touched Argentine soil again. The person who reorganizes and polishes them, me, is no longer, at least I’m not the person I once was. All this wandering around Our America with a capital A has changed me more than I thought.

These pages are a testimony—a photographic negative, as he also put it—of an experience that changed him, a first departure toward the outer world which, like his final departure, was Quixotic in its semi-unconscious style and, as for Quixote, had the same effect on the scope of his consciousness. This was the spirit of a dreamer experiencing an awakening.

In principle, and with the perfect logic of the unforeseeable, their journey was at first directed toward North America, as in fact it turned out to be: toward the photographic negative of North America that is South American poverty and helplessness, and toward real knowledge of what North America means for us.

The enormity of our endeavor escaped us in those moments; all we could see was the dust on the road ahead and ourselves on the bike, devouring kilometers in our flight northward. Wasn’t that dust on the road, though without Che realizing it, really the same dust José Martí³ saw when he traveled from La Guaira to Caracas in a common little coach? Wasn’t it the Quixotic dust in which the ghosts of American redemption appeared, the natural cloud of dust that must rise when our terrible casing of chains falls to the ground?⁴ But Martí was coming from the north, and Che was traveling toward himself, catching only glimpses of his destiny, which we glimpse as well through his anecdotes and vignettes.

Comeback, the little dog with aviator’s impulses Che presents to us so comically, leaping around the motorcycle from Villa Gesell to Miramar, reappears years later in the Sierra Maestra mountains as a puppy who must be strangled, because of its hysterical howls during an unsuccessful ambush laid in the hope of catching [Batis-ta’s notorious army colonel] Sánchez Mosquera. With one last nervous twitch, the puppy stopped moving. There it lay, sprawled out, its little head spread over the twigs.⁵ But, at the end of this incident from Reminiscences of the Cuban Revolutionary War, another dog appears lying in the hamlet of Mar Verde:

Félix patted its head, and the dog looked at him. Félix returned the glance, and then he and I exchanged a guilty look. Suddenly everyone fell silent. An imperceptible stirring came over us, as the dog’s meek yet roguish gaze seemed to contain a hint of reproach. There, in our presence, though observing us through the eyes of another dog, was the murdered puppy.

It was Comeback who had returned, living up to his name, reminding us also of what Ezequiel Martínez Estrada, our other great Argentine, said about José Martí’s campaign diary:

These emotions, these sensations, cannot be described or expressed in the language of poets and painters, musicians and mystics; they must be . . . absorbed without reply, as animals do with their contemplative and entranced eyes.⁶

A comparison of Reminiscences with The Motorcycle Diaries shows us that, even though more than 10 years had passed, the latter was a literary model for the former. It contains the same moderation; the same candor; the same nimble freshness; exactly the same concept of moments used to provide unity for each brief chapter; and, of course, the same imperturbable steadiness that accepts both happy and tragic events without sharp inhalation or exhalation.

It isn’t literary skill but fidelity to experience and narrative effectiveness that is sought. When both are attained, skill follows naturally, taking its allotted place, neither blinding nor disturbing but making its contribution. Here, with little fumbling or hesitation, Che’s style is already formed. The years would polish it, just as he himself polished his will with the pleasure of an artist, though not that of a wordsmith: a quiet shyness forced him not to dwell too much but to push on with the words toward the poetry of the naked image, which his minimal touch turned into reality. His I—it-in-me circle opens and closes continually without ever becoming dense, accommodating a style that prefers to remain hidden. The prose on the page sheds light, though does not drag on the imperceptible lightness of the narrative. It flows between description of feeling (in Reminiscences, the determined murderer left a trail of burned huts, of sullen sadness . . .) and narrative accounts in which he searches for himself (in the Diaries, Man, the measure of all things, speaks here through my mouth and narrates in my own language that which my eyes have seen) and sometimes even seems to be watching us.

Che’s colorful prose paints objects as far as his eyes can see and often, if the landscape permits it, with an intimate touch:

The road snakes between the low foothills that sound the beginning of the great cordillera of the Andes, then descends steeply until it reaches an unattractive, miserable town, surrounded in sharp contrast by magnificent, densely wooded mountains.

The episode of the attempt to steal wine, and others in this cheeky tradition, contains precious pearls of diction:

The fact was, we were as broke as ever, retracing in our minds the smiles that had greeted my drunken antics, trying to find some trace of the irony with which we could identify the thief.

A sense of strangeness returns. In the chapter Circular Exploration: As night fell it brought us a thousand strange noises and the sensation of walking into empty space with each step. In Reminiscences: Then, in the middle of the ambush, an eerie moment of silence arose. When we went to gather the dead after the initial shooting, there was no one on the highway . . . The imagery is fairly bursting with both the abundance and the silence of the visual world:

The huge figure of a stag dashed like a quick breath across the stream and his body, silver by the light of the rising moon, disappeared into the undergrowth. This tremor of nature cut straight to our hearts. (The Motorcycle Diaries)

[Fidel’s] voice and presence in the woods, lit up by the torches, took on moving tones, and you could see that our leader changed the ideas of many people. (Reminiscences)

Though reference is made to Fidel’s voice and tone, the scene seems silent to us, as if it has been witnessed from afar.

In these travel notes, several Quixotic or Chaplinesque episodes—such as the already cited theft of the wine, the nocturnal pursuit of the two young men by a furious swarm of dancers, their enlistment in a corps of Chilean firefighters, the delectable escapade of the melons and their trail over the waves, and the enigma of the impossible photo in a miserable hut on a hill near Caracas—are wrapped in a similar silence.

La Poderosa’s near to last stand is told with cinematographic effect and we seem to be watching it all amid a film-like silence:

I threw on the hand brake which, soldered ineptly, also broke. For some moments, I saw nothing more than the blurred shape of cattle flying past us on each side, while poor Poderosa gathered speed down the steep hill. By an absolute miracle we managed to graze only the leg of the last cow, but in the distance a river was screaming toward us with terrifying efficacy. I veered on to the side of the road and in the blink of an eye the bike mounted the two-meter bank, embedding us between two rocks, but we were unhurt.

These youthful adventures—veined with cheerfulness, humor and frequently self-directed irony—seek the spirit of the landscape rather than merely the scenery. That spirit was found in the sudden appearance of the deer: We walked slowly so as not to disturb the peace of the wild sanctuary with which we were now communing. Che writes with none of the sarcasm he dedicates to the topic of religion: Both [of us] assistants waited for Sunday [and the roast] with a kind of religious devotion. So while being unbelievers, they were able to feel the metaphorical presence of a sanctuary in nature, where they were in close rapport with its spirit—immediately reminding us of analogous images from the freethinking Martí, such as this from his Simple Verses: The bishop of Spain seeks / Supports for his shrine. / On wild mountain peaks / The poplars are mine.⁷

On March 7, 1952, in Valparaíso, they came face to face with injustice: its victim was an asthmatic old woman, a customer in a small shop by the name of La Gioconda:

The poor thing was in a pitiful state, breathing the acrid smell of concentrated sweat and dirty feet that filled her room, mixed with the dust from a couple of armchairs, the only luxury items in her house. On top of her asthma, she had a heart condition.

After completing a picture of total ruin, and further embittered by the animosity of the sick woman’s family, Che—who felt helpless as a doctor and was approaching the awakening of conscience that would trigger his other, definitive vocation—wrote these memorable words:

It is there, in the final moments, for people whose farthest horizon has always been tomorrow, that one comprehends the profound tragedy circumscribing the life of the proletariat the world over. In those dying eyes there is a submissive appeal for forgiveness and also, often, a desperate plea for consolation which is lost to the void, just as their body will soon be lost in the magnitude of the mystery surrounding us.

Unable to continue their journey any other way, the pair decided to stow away on a ship that would take them to Antofa-gasta, Chile. At that moment, they—or, at least, Che—did not see things so clearly:

There [looking at the sea, leaning side by side on the railing of the San Antonio], we understood that our vocation, our true vocation, was to move for eternity along the roads and seas of the world. Always curious, looking into everything that came before our eyes, sniffing out each corner but only ever faintly—not setting down roots in any land or staying long enough to see the substratum of things; the outer limits would suffice.

The sea held a greater attraction than the voyagers’ road, because where land demands that even those in passing take root, the sea represents absolute freedom from all ties. And now, I feel my great roots unearth, free, and . . . The verse that heads the chapter on his liberation from Chichina says it all. All? Che tore up another root in the presence of the old asthmatic Chilean woman. And soon his chest would be stung again when he made friends with a married Chilean couple, communist workers who had been harassed in Baquedano.

The couple, numb with cold, in the desert night, huddling against each other in the desert night, were a living representation of the proletariat in any part of the world.

Like good sons of San Martín,⁸ they shared their blankets with them.

It was one of the coldest times in my life, but also one which made me feel a little more brotherly toward this strange, for me at least, human species.

That strangeness, that deep separation and intrepid solitude in which he was still wrapped, is curious. There is nothing lonelier than adventure. Until he was filled with pity for the galley slaves and for the whipped child, Don Quixote was alone, surrounded by strangeness, by the craziness of the world around him. In his Meditations on Quixote, José Ortega y Gasset wrote, as the center of his reflections, I am myself and my circumstances, which has usually been understood as the sum or symbiosis of two factors. It may also be understood as a dilemma in which the I or myself expresses those two factors as separated, distanced, though intensely related. This dilemma appeared in Che’s memoirs of his first departure, when he

Reviews for The Motorcycle Diaries

[seindina · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Thank You This Is Very Good, Maybe This Can Help You
Download Full Ebook Very Detail Here :
https://amzn.to/3XOf46C
- You Can See Full Book/ebook Offline Any Time
- You Can Read All Important Knowledge Here
- You Can Become A Master In Your Business

[kalliegrace · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This guy sounds like a hoot, but I need to read a biography to get any actual picture of his life. This is just funny ramblings about his travels with glimpses of his character peeking through.

[stahl2ricco · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

“ This is not a story of heroic feats, or merely the narrative of a cynic. It is a glimpse of two lives running parallel for a time, with similar hopes and convergent dreams.

Nine months. On the motorbike La Poderosa II - The Mighty One, with Alberto Granado. Until it breaks down, and then “…just two hitchhikers with backpacks, and with all the grime of the road stuck to our overalls, shadows of our former aristocratic selves.” Subsisting mostly on bread, cheese, and mate. Two hungry doctors, on the road!

Learning more about leprosy. Ernesto’s asthma. That river dolphin story! Those poor peaches under the window! Begging for money, food and lodging. It's a good travel story, and I learned a great deal, flipping back to the map many a time to orient myself as to their whereabouts. The pictures in the middle are pretty dang good too! The book made me want to follow their journey, and see what they saw. I'm sure plenty has changed, but the plight of the people, especially the indigenous people, is almost assuredly the same. Easy to see why a revolutionary was born!

"The future belongs to the people, and gradually, or in one strike, they will take power. here and in every country. The terrible thing is the people need to be educated, and this they cannot do before taking power, only after."

[paul_s-289480 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

More of a historical document, because when judged as a book it's not really worthwhile. The young author recounts his journey across Southern America, written in a humorous tone as he and his friend scrounge, steal, scam and abuse the generosity of the people they meet along the way. Including trying to have sex with a wife of a man who helps them along the way. This is interspersed with passages about the noble savages and imperialist west. It's so banal it's hard to take any of it seriously.

[pdcread · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This is the first of the diaries that Che Guevara wrote when he first set of on a journey around South America. It starts as two lads having a bit of a laugh on a motorbike, and as het meets more people he starts to seethe with the injustice that they suffer.

Well written and well translated.

[Gonza83 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A young Che Guevara, germinating what was later nourished by travel experiences. It makes you want to get a "Poderosa" and go road-tripping. A way of seeing Latin America that isn't visible in luxury hotels. I have to admit it's one of the few books that had a decent movie adaptation. (Translated from Spanish)

[BryanManrquez · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

To begin to understand that as Latin Americans we are all connected, this is where the ideals that Che defended start, and from which one can immerse oneself. (Translated from Spanish)

[TATI15 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

The story immerses you in the history and thoughts of these two crazy geniuses on their journey through Latin America and how it changes Che's mindset. (Translated from Spanish)

[itaccari · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The story immerses you in the history and thought of these two crazy geniuses on their journey through Latin America and how it changes Che's mindset. (Translated from Spanish)

[reganrule · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Honestly I expected to see a little more revolutionary spirit, and fewer complaints about modes of transport and his self-inflicted poverty.

[mahallett · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

a good story of being young, travelling rough

[timbazzett · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

THE MOTORCYCLE DIARIES: NOTES ON A LATIN AMERICAN JOURNEY, by Ernesto "Che" Guevara.

Guevara's journal of his "off to see the world" trip with his older pal, Alberto Granado, was fairly interesting, if not compelling, reading. I have only the usual vague knowledge of Guevara, Castro's important compadre in overthrowing the Batista regime in Cuba's 1959 revolution. Several years ago I read Chuck Pfarrer's excellent novel, KILLING CHE (2008), a fictional look at Che's final months in the jungles of Bolivia, where his life ended under shrouded circumstances, after his capture by government troops in 1967.

This book is vastly different. It's in Guevara's own words, the words of a very young man (he turned 24 in these pages, in 1952) "off to see the world" with a pal, Alberto Granado. His friend was already a doctor who specialized in leprosy, but Che was taking a break from his last years of med school to make this trip. He had not yet become the "revolutionary." He was just a young guy off on an adventure. And they had plenty, enduring multiple wipeouts and mechanical problems on the rough roads of South America. Granado's old Norton cycle, reduced to a badly broken machine held together with odd bits of wire, tires and inner tubes with multiple improvised patches, was finally abandoned before the trip was half over. The pair's status as "motorized bums" then entered a new stage as "bums without wheels." They were also plagued by various illnesses, mosquitoes and road injuries, and Guevara himself suffered numerous attacks of asthma, a chronic condition that stayed with him throughout his life.

They made numerous stops in cities, towns and villages as their trip took them from Argentina through Chile, Peru, Colombia, Venezuela, Brazil and beyond. They visited a leper colony along the way, as well as tiny villages with primitive native inhabitants where clothing was sometimes optional, a feature our young narrator appreciated. In one visit to a tribe of "Yaguas, the Indians of the red straw," he commented, "The women had abandoned traditional costume for ordinary clothes, so you couldn't admire their jugs." And later, during their stay in Caracas, he makes this comment about blacks and white Portuguese workers -

"Discrimination and poverty unite them in the daily fight for survival, but their different ways of approaching life separate them completely: the black is indolent and a dreamer; spending his meager wage on frivolity or drink; the European has a tradition of work and saving ..."

Not exactly politically correct, but these are the observations of a still-young man, not the legendary revolutionary that Guevara would later become. THE MOTORCYCLE DIARIES is a pretty detailed look at the early opinions of the young Guevara who is often moved by the social inequities and abject poverty he sees on his journey. The book also contains a detailed introduction by Cintio Vitier placing the narrative in historical context, as well as timelines of both the journey and Guevara's life. I would recommend this book to anyone interested in learning more about Latin America, its history and revolutions. Oh, and P.S. - I learned that "Che" is simply an Argentinian interjection that can mean simply "hey," or is a conversational 'filler' word. It was a nickname given him by his Cuban compatriots because of the way he used the word constantly in his conversation, an oddity to the Cubans. In our own language, it might manifest itself as the ubiquitous "like" or maybe, "dude." And no, it's not in this book. I had to look it up.

[bookworm12_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Che Guevara became an iconic figure because of his work as a revolutionary in Cuba, but long before that he wrote this memoir about his travels as a young man. When he was 23-years-old, he and his friend Alberto left Argentina in the 1950s to travel through South America.

He chronicles his thoughts and feelings about the things they see and the people they met along the way. It’s impossible not to spend much of the book wondering which events helped plant the seeds that made him into the man he became. For example, his work in the leper colonies showed him a completely different side of humanity.

This was one of the few examples of a book that I thought was better as a film. There’s something about the stilted nature of Guevara’s narration that didn’t work well for me. The 2004 film allows that to drop off and shows the audience the beauty and pain of what he sees instead of trying to describe it.  

[andreablythe · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

As a young man, Che Guevara and friend Alberto Granado decided to travel by motor cycle from Buenos Aires, Argentina, up through Chile to the United States. They manage on the bike for a while, then on foot and hitching, all the while surviving on the good will of others for sustenance. They work a bit, visit several leprosy clinics, and witness quite a bit of poverty along the way.

Che's travel diary if this trips shows his young man's point of view. It's honest and frank and often quite funny. It also hints at the beginnings of his revolutionary spirit, which would eventually lead him to joining the revolution with Fidel Castro in Cuba and would eventually make him a worldwide symbol of that same revolutionary spirit.

[blake.rosser · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Much more interesting than the movie, and predictably with much less of a revolutionary feel. This is just a spoiled young kid without any idea of who he is, trying to rough it in order to get a glimpse of real life. The movie was lame.

[xiuhcoatl-1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Possibly one of my favorite books of all time. While it can be a little slow at times, I feel it encompasses the feelings of life- that is happiness, boredom, failure, and triumph...

[edgeworth_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I'm currently riding through Vietnam on a rickety 1980 Minsk motorcycle, so I felt like a bit of topical reading, and was lucky enough to find this in a second-hand bookstore in Hoi An. It's a non-fiction memoir detailing the travels of famous revolutionary Ernesto "Che" Guevera, as he and his friend Alberto travel across South America.

Firstly, I need to clarify something: this title of this book is a goddamn lie. It should just be called The Diaries, because they total their bike within the first 50 pages and spend the rest of the book hitchhiking.

It's a moot point anyway, because I wouldn't have enjoyed this book either way. Maybe it's the translation, or maybe there's just something about Latin people, but Guevera's writing style drove me nuts. It's far too lyrical, too vague, too swept up in itself. It reminded me of the only other Latin writer I've sampled, Garbiel Garcia Marquez, whom I found equally unreadable.

If you don't mind that sort of thing, or if you're interested in Che Guevera, go for it. Otherwise avoid. Excuse the brief review, I've just picked up my fortnightly bout of TD and feel like crap. God I miss the first world.

[tronella_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I am impressed by how much of this I understood! It was pretty fun to read, too. But whoever made the film of this book focused on really minor parts of it. Hm.

[pjmazumdar_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

It is inevitable that anyone who reads this book would have vivid images of Che Guevra intruding into his or her mind. Who doesn't remember the stunning photo image of Guevra, said to be the most copied image in the world? Then the image of Guevra fighting through the marshes to capture Cuba, and then when Castro and the others set about rebuilding the country, taking his gun again to fight his lonely battles for liberation in other countries. And the last flashing image, a tired, defeated Guevra tied down in a shack in the jungles of Bolivia, shouting his famous last words to the drunk captain sent to shoot him and who lost his nerve in his presence, "Shoot, you fool, you are only shooting a man!"

But it is not Guevra as a revolutionary who wrote this book. Instead, it is a young Guevra, a loveable, fun guy who sets out to discover his homeland, losing his motorcycle into page 30 but continuing his travels, bluffing, scamming, working, stowing away, and doing whatever it takes to go on his way. He and his friend come across as two delightful guys with their humor, pranks and various adventures. We see the young Guevra without any false ego or pride, curious and sympathetic to his fellow men, moved by their sufferings, amused at the vanity of others who should have been more sympathetic, and yet always preserving his own humility and ability to laugh at himself.

It is said that when you love a book, you want to be friends with the author. After reading this book you are sure to want Che to have been your friend, to have taken you along for the ride...

[chriscapoccia · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The Motorcycle Diaries show Che before he was the Marxist revolutionary; when he was just an ordinary guy on a road trip through South America; when his conscience was being awakened by poverty and inequality. Each journal entry is a compelling self-contained story, but the entries are somewhat disjointed from each other. Anyway, it makes for good bathroom reading as the chapters are short. There really isn't any ending, so the editor closed the book with a speech given eight years later, after Che had become a key figure in the Cuban revolution.

[adonis72-1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I found this quite interesting to read from a content point of view and how the things he saw and experienced shaped him, but in terms of writing style it was quite dry and hard going.

I read the book before I saw the film, and this is one of the few occasions where I enjoyed the film more. As someone who has travelled around South America, I thought it captured the essence of the continent much better.

Definately woth reading if you're interested in Che though.

[mflowers-2 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

The book in read was “Motorcycle Diaries” by Ernesto “Che” Guevara. The book was good, but could have overall been better. In some parts of the book, I could not put down the book. In other parts of the book, I felt as though I just wanted to return it to the library.

The story tells how to Argentinean men, Ernesto Guevara and his friend Alberto traveled through South America on their motorcycle; they named La Poderosa II. Through the book they are visiting many countries, sometimes looking for different places to stay and eat. They often found places to eat, and drink a lot. They often were invited to parties, where they were kicked out most of the time.

Throughout the book they are faced with many problems. Most of the problems that they faced involved their motorcycle. Whether it was breaking down, or had trouble getting through the rough terrain. Some of their other problems included food and shelter. Often, their motorcycle would break down, and they would have to find a place to stay right then, and if they didn’t they had to sleep on the road. Along with food and shelter, they had deep money problem, which they were very often low on.

I would recommend this book for an older audience, or one with a lot of patience. I would recommend this book for an audience with a lot of patience because this is not the most entertaining book, so it takes someone with a lot of patience to read through the whole thing. I recommended this for an older audience because this is not the easiest book to understand, it had many parts were I did not I understand what they were talking about.

[neiljohnford · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

God damn LibraryThing just swallowed my last review so have to start over again...

This is a cool book. I've always been reluctant to jump on the whole Che Guevara as a "anti-establishment poster-boy" bandwagon (does anyone else see the irony in Che merchandise?). Read this book though - it explains the man behind the icon. This was written when he was still a kid really (in a way it's a rite of passage diary) and describes a road trip through the american continent starting in Argentina then up the Andes through Chile and Peru to North America (miami). I like this because it's very human. You can see the evolution of Guevara's politics in his observations (he is very articulate about the way indigenous americans are treated by the latin americans and the social divide between them). Think George Orwell's best non-fiction (Down and Out..., Homage to Catalonia etc.) - this tells the experiences that shaped Guevara's thinking. It's actually really well written as well. In addition to being a medical doctor, commander of guerillas and international politician, Guevara had a bit of knack with the written word. It's funny too. It's not often that a book makes me laugh out loud but an anecdote about a stay with some Germans, an open first floor window, a bout of the squits and an unfortunately placed tray of drying peaches had me (I read this on a plane - if you ever want to make Easy Jet cabin crew nervous try sitting on your own at the back and laughing. Maybe that's why I got stopped at customs, or am I being paranoid...hmmm).

Anyway - highly recomend this and I'll be looking for Guevara's notes from the Cuban revolution. 5 stars!

[bung_8 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I read this after a return from Cuba. It was an interesting story of a great revolutionary.

[cestovatela · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

An interesting peek at a young revolutionary in development. Guevara's prose is spare and captivating, but his view on native people leaves a bit to be desired. Still, this work makes humanizes Guevara after he's become so much of an icon.