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

254 reframing latin america
year, he and his best friend embarked on an eight-month hitchhiking adventure:
it took them through northern Argentina again and then on to
Chile, Peru, Colombia, Venezuela, and, fi nally, the United States. He was
already a disciplined diarist, and a few years later, when he was no longer
signing himself “Pig” but, rather, “Che,” he took his notes from that trip
and turned them into a book. It was translated into English in 1995 and
became a brisk seller for the British publishing house Verso, under the title
The Motorcycle Diaries.
The diarist is an idealistic young medical student who has chosen his profession
as a way of doing good in the world but otherwise does not think
much about politics. The living conditions of the people he travels among
shock him, but he is just as susceptible to the wonder of Machu Picchu [. . .].
By his own account, this jolly and enthusiastic young man was buried
forever at the expedition’s close [. . .].
We do know that his discovery of the revolutionary faith transformed
him, as a writer, into a hopeless termagant. And we know something more
remarkable: that the words he wrote were not simply a young man’s posturing;
for, from the time of his fi nal departure from Argentina the following
year, 1953, to the moment of his death in 1967, the asthmatic, footloose,
irreverent diarist sought to become the iron-willed avenger of his prophecy.
Another idealistic and enterprising young man, upon being confronted with
the poverty, racism, and injustice that Guevara sees and records in The Motorcycle
Diaries might have strengthened his commitment to medicine, or
thought of ways to give Latin America’s poor the weapon of literacy. For reasons
that even the most ambitious biographer can only speculate on—rage
against his father, love of humanity—Guevara decided instead to spend his
life creating Che, the harsh angel.
Guevara remained a pilgrim for another three years, waiting for a cause
to fi nd him. During that time, he fl oated northward again, read Marx
and Lenin, and decided that he was a Marxist. In Bolivia in 1953, he was
a skeptical witness of Víctor Paz Estenssoro’s populist revolution, whose
limited—but hardly insignifi cant—achievements included the liberation of
the Indian peasantry from virtual fi efdom and the establishment of universal
suffrage. For his part, Guevara never considered any alternatives to
violence and radicalism, and perhaps it is true that in the Latin America of
those years it required more self-delusion to be a moderate reformer than
to be a utopian revolutionary. At any rate, a nine-month stay in Guatemala
was cut short by the 1954 coup against the reformist government of Jacobo
Arbenz—a coup sponsored by the Central Intelligence Agency. This monumentally
stupid event not only set Guatemala on the road to decades of