Che Guevara and the Motorcycle Diaries

At 22, Ernesto traveled for nine months across South America.

The revolution is not an apple that falls when it is ripe. You have to make it fall.

- Che Guevara

Many of the most vivid images I had of South America before coming here came from a superb film, The Motorcycle Diaries. The movie depicts the 5,000 mile motorcycle journey of Ernesto (Che) Guevara, an Argentine who traveled all across South America in 1951 during a year off from medical school. His travels were transformative; the striking poverty and exploitation he encountered radicalized him into believing fundamental change was needed to improve the world.

Ernesto the medial student later became Che, the legendary Argentine Marxist revolutionary, and his image is one of the most recognizable on the planet. He was extremely intelligent (and athletic too), but more than anything, he was a man of action. Fomenting revolutions around the world, perhaps most successfully in Cuba, it is incredible he was able to live and influence the world's ideas and emotions as much as he did before finally being caught -- and executed -- in the jungles of Bolivia.

Few would defend his liberal use of violence to effect change. However, Che's story is nonetheless illuminating when it comes to South American history and the ongoing struggle of the indigenous and the poor.

The Motorcycle Diaries and its images are not far off from some of what I have encountered outside the cleaned up city centers of South America. To be sure, it can be overwhelming sometimes to think of how many people in our world are still without education and resources, still exploited, still left behind.

Like many of the most memorable names of history, Che carries with it a complex, flawed and hypocritical legacy. Too often those like him who intend to do long-term good commit short-term evil to accomplish their greater goals. The only way we can avoid this, I think, is to follow Martin Luther King's imperative of constantly making sure that our ends are pre-existent in our means.

And the leaders of the world today talk eloquently about peace. Every time we drop our bombs in North Vietnam, President Johnson talks eloquently about peace. What is the problem? They are talking about peace as a distant goal, as an end we seek, but one day we must come to see that peace is not merely a distant goal we seek, but that it is a means by which we arrive at that goal. We must pursue peaceful ends through peaceful means. All of this is saying that, in the final analysis, means and ends must cohere because the end is preexistent in the means, and ultimately destructive means cannot bring about constructive ends.

--Martin Luther King, Jr., "A CHRISTMAS SERMON" 24 December 1967

What makes history tough is finding things admirable in those who did evil. How do we value the good in Che without giving undue honor to a violent man? I was struck by the literacy campaign he helped organize in Cuba, a great example of how willpower and mass action can overcome what seems on the surface like an intractable social problem. From the worth-reading Wikipedia article on Che:

Before 1959 the official literacy rate for Cuba was between 60–76%, with educational access in rural areas and a lack of instructors the main determining factors. As a result, the Cuban government at Guevara's behest dubbed 1961 the "year of education", and mobilized over 100,000 volunteers into "literacy brigades", who were then sent out into the countryside to construct schools, train new educators, and teach the predominately illiterate guajiros (peasants) to read and write. Unlike many of Guevara's later economic initiatives, this campaign was "a remarkable success". By the completion of the Cuban Literacy Campaign, 707,212 adults had been taught to read and write, raising the national literacy rate to 96%.

While traveling through many parts of the world, we must inevitably encounter and grapple with the poverty that so much of humanity lives with. It is difficult to come to terms with the enormity of the world's problems; even more difficult is answering the questions we ask ourselves about what we should be doing to help.