Critical Mick

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Travelling with Che Guevara: The Making of a Revolutionary
by Alberto Granado
Pimlico, 2003

Squeezing Every Last Mile Outta The Story

For many years, I have felt un-cool over the number of times I crashed the old Honda motorbike I used to ride. Estoy un bobo no more! Travelling with Che Guevara: The Making of a Revolutionary is Alberto Granado's companion piece to The Motorcycle Diaries. Those two travellers dumped that stupid bike all the time, and still wound up as famous as The Fonz.

Granado is the Argentine doctor who owned the clapped-out motorbike, "Ponderosa II" upon which he and Ernesto "Che" Guevara rode around the South America of the 1950's, witnessing the horrors of poverty and social injustices and becoming inspired to take action. Granado afterward turned to medical skills toward the fight against Leprosy. Che helped Castro into power in Cuba.

(Slight correction to the above: during their journey, Granado was called by the nickname "Mial" and Che "El Pelao" (Baldy) or "Fúser." It wasn't until training with anti-Batista exiles in Mexico that Guevara picked up his more famous nickname. For sake of clarity, I will be an anachronistic and call the formative figure in Granado's book "Che" anyway. That should also help this review's Google rankings.)

Granado's diary records details of the trek through Argentina, Chile, Peru, Colombia and beyond: locations, people met, conversations, jokes, meals, sights. Also documented are the thoughts and observations these triggered. Granado's notes may have been ample for readers who are familiar with the places and times, but do not paint a complete enough picture for a twenty-first century outsider. As a travelogue, Travelling with Che Guevara ranks well below the work of Pete McCarthy, Stuart Stevens, Bill Bryson or (closer to the era) Eric Newby.

Of course, as the title suggests, Granado's book is meant for Che fans. Here as well it's disappointing. First: there's something false in a diary that deals more with one's travelling companion's political thoughts that with one's own actions. The diary must have later been doctored, so can it be trusted as an accurate account?

Second: there's not much making of this revolutionary. From the very start, Guevara espouses Che-like observations and maxims. Political awareness and class focus were more firmly fixed, setting out, than the motorcycle's bockety frame. There's no development to Che's character. Finally: Che is a pendejo! Sure, many people call me a jerk for my own caustic opinions. But Che and Mial have the philosophy never to pay for what they could get for free. They travel by conning people into giving them food and lodging or slipping out in the middle of the night to dodge the bill. Che hits on married women and tries to drag them outside for sex. He blames Yankees, Jews and Europeans for all the trouble rather than joining in Granado's efforts to offer medical assistance to those in need. And once, Che shot their hostess's pet dog in the head! (Admittedly, that was an amusing accident. The pair bolted rather than apologize, though.) What pendejos! I was so glad when that piranha bit them.

Dervla Murphy and her daughter (aged nine) crossed Peru on a donkey. Sorry, Che!

Critical Mick says: offering little that's not already in The Motorcycle Diaries, Granado's Travelling with Che Guevara looked to be a promising first-hand account but will probably only please a minority of die-hard Che Guevara fans. For a more in-depth exploration of life among the poor of South America in the 1900's, I recommend reading instead Eight Feet in the Andes by Dervla Murphy and seeing what that triggers.

Yo! This review and all content on the DFA Guide site are copyright 2008 Mick Halpin. All links to other sites and documents are copyright to whatever source wrote something cool enough for Mick to give it a referral. Try to claim them as your own work and bad karma will catch up with you, baby. Believe it.

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This Page Was Last Updated On 22 July, 2008.

By the way, "Che" is a dude-like word that Argentine people supposedly use all the time, though I've never heard the Argentine doctor that I work with say it at all.