Reframing Latin America: A Cultural Theory Reading ... - BGSU Blogs

the socialist utopia 241
incite a successful movement. In 1966 he traveled to Bolivia, where he tried
to initiate the fi rst of many revolutionary fronts throughout Latin America.
In 1967 he was hunted down and shot by the Bolivian military.
Throughout his abbreviated life and his many travels, Che was a fastidious
diarist. At least four of his diaries have been published as books, including
those from his trip in 1951–1952 (the so-called Motorcycle Diaries), his
time fi ghting in Cuba between 1957 and 1959, in Africa in 1965, and in Bolivia
in 1966–1967. Che also authored a defi nitive treatise on revolutionary
militancy, On Guerrilla Warfare. In our attempt here to gain insight into
the thinking of a socialist revolutionary, any one of these texts would provide
ample opportunities for analysis. But we will focus on The Motorcycle
Diaries, in part because of its accessibility, but also because the release in
2004 of a major motion picture starring the young Mexican actor Gael García
Bernal, promises to make the story of the Diaries one of the more readily
recognized aspects of Che’s life. 1
Among Che scholars, it is becoming fairly well-accepted that his eightmonth,
eight-thousand-mile journey throughout South America in 1951 and
1952 was a pivotal moment in his political evolution. Che himself accepted
that the trip had changed him. As he says in the prologue to the published
version of the Diaries, which he wrote years later, “Wandering around ‘our
America with a capital A’ has changed me more than I thought. . . . I now
leave you with myself, the man I once was.” 2 By his own admission, he
began the trip as a privileged member of the bourgeoisie, but the realities
of Latin America seeped into his consciousness and his political perspective
was on the way to being overhauled. He and his traveling companion
became, in his words, “shadows of our former aristocratic selves.” 3
We were unable to gain permission to reprint excerpts from the Diaries,
perhaps because of the heightened exposure the movie gave the published
diary at the time of this writing. But a summary description of the Diaries
here will be sufficient to offer a semiotic interpretation. It will also set the
stage for a reading on Che by Alma Guillermoprieto and for two fi lm analyses
we have written and included here—one of the fi lm based on the Diaries
and the other of Soy Cuba (I Am Cuba), which was made in Cuba shortly
after the triumph of the revolution.
During the eight-month odyssey in 1951–1952, Guevara traveled with
Alberto Granado, a doctor then twenty-nine years old, who owned the motorcycle
called La Poderosa II (The Powerful II) on which they began their
journey. 4 Guevara and Granado began their trip in Córdoba, Argentina, one
of Argentina’s interior cities located roughly eight hundred miles northwest
of Buenos Aires. They fi rst headed southeast to Argentina’s Atlantic