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

the socialist utopia 247
see shortly in Elena Garro’s story, “It’s the Fault of the Tlaxcaltecas.” Che’s
inspired descriptions of Indians and Indian ruins could easily have been met
with favor by adherents of nationalism, even though Che himself was suspicious
of nationalism at the time and eventually rejected the idea of nations
in favor of revolutionary internationalism.
The Motorcycle Diaries was written by a young man whose future as a
revolutionary was still unknown. We should be careful not to extrapolate
too much from it, either about Che in later life or about the broader whole of
socialism in Latin America. Even though Che’s life was cut short, he might
have changed his views as he grew older. The Che Guevara who implemented
policy in Cuba and tried to foment revolutionary fronts in Africa
and Bolivia might have been quite different from the young Ernesto Guevara
who hitchhiked around the Andes and was impressed by the sights.
Nevertheless, we have tried to demonstrate in our semiotic reading of
The Motorcycle Diaries that this formative moment in Che Guevara’s life
was profoundly inundated by discourses. To the extent that Che retained
these ideas—or even if he changed them radically in later life—we can begin
to intuit the discursive frameworks that went into the socialist project in
Latin America. This will be more evident in our analyses of The Motorcycle
Diaries and Soy Cuba that follow and the reading by Alma Guillermoprieto.
Film Analysis: THE MOTORCYCLE DIARIES
The Motorcycle Diaries, a fi lm based upon the diaries of both Che and
Granado—With Che Through Latin America—was released in U.S. theaters
in Sep tem ber 2004. Directed by Walter Salles (who also made Behind the
Sun and Central Station) and starring Gael García Bernal as Che Guevara,
the fi lm stays mostly true to the events and chronology of Che’s journey as
depicted in the published version of his diary. But the notable aspect of the
fi lm is the way it reads Che uncritically as a heroic fi gure and how it uses
the visual medium to achieve that goal.
The narrative objective of the fi lm is to show that the journey with Alberto
Granado was pivotal in giving rise to Che’s revolutionary consciousness
as he witnessed suffering and injustice across the continent. That message
is not necessarily obvious in Che’s diaries. We have noted that the
most explicit reference to this revolutionary effect came in an epilogue that
Che apparently penned long after the trip’s conclusion. But to maintain a
semblance of narrative drive, the fi lm placed this consciousness-raising process
more at the center of the fi lm, even making it the pivotal moment near
the fi lm’s end.