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The Motorcycle Diaries

Notes on a Latin American Journey

Part of The Che Guevara Library

Author Ernesto Che Guevara
Foreword by Aleida Guevara
Introduction by Walter Salles, Cintio Vitier
Paperback
$17.95 US
Seven Stories Press
5.51"W x 8.49"H x 0.57"D  
On sale Jul 16, 2021 | 192 Pages | 9781644210680
Grades 9-12 + AP/IB
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A New York Times bestseller
With a new introduction by The Motorcyle Diaries filmmaker Walter Salles, and featuring 24 pages of photos taken by Che.

The Motorcycle Diaries is Che Guevara's diary of his journey to discover the continent of Latin America while still a medical student, setting out in 1952 on a vintage Norton motorcycle together with his friend Alberto Granado, a biochemist. It captures, arguably as much as any book ever written, the exuberance and joy of one person's youthful belief in the possibilities of humankind tending towards justice, peace and happiness.

After the release in 2004 of the exhilarating film of the same title, directed by Walter Salles, the book became a New York Times and international bestseller.

This edition includes a new introduction by Walter Salles and an array of new material that was assembled for the 2004 edition coinciding with the release of the film, including 24 pages of previously unpublished photos taken by Che, notes and comments by his wife, Aleida Guevara March, and an extensive introduction by the distinguished Cuban author, Cintio Vitier.


"A journey, a number of journeys. Ernesto Guevara in search of adventure, Ernesto Guevara in search of America, Ernesto Guevara in search of Che. On this journey, solitude found solidarity. 'I' turned into 'we.'"—Eduardo Galeano

"As his journey progresses, Guevara's voice seems to deepen, to darken, colored by what he witnesses in his travels. He is still poetic, but now he comments on what he sees, though still poetically, with a new awareness of the social and political ramifications of what's going on around him."—January Magazine

"Our film is about a young man, Che, falling in love with a continent and finding his place in it."
—Walter Salles, director of the film version of The Motorcycle Diaries

"All this wandering around 'Our America with a Capital A' has changed me more than I thought."
—Ernesto Che Guevara, from The Motorcycle Diaries
ERNESTO GUEVARA DE LA SERNA was born in Rosario, Argentina, on June 14, 1928. While studying for a medical degree in Buenos Aires, he took a trip with his friend Alberto Granado on an old Norton motorcycle through all of Latin America, the basis for The Motorcycle Diaries. During his travels he witnessed the Bolivian revolution in 1953; and, in Guatemala in 1954, the overthrow of the democratically elected government of Jacobo Arbenz by US-backed forces. Forced to leave Guatemala, he went to Mexico City, where he linked up with exiled Cuban revolutionaries and met Fidel Castro in 1955. Che joined their expedition to Cuba, where the revolutionary war began in the Sierra Maestra mountains. At first Che was the troop doctor, and later became Rebel Army commander in July 1957.  Following the rebels’ victory on January 1, 1959, he was a key leader of the new revolutionary government and also of the political organization that in 1965 became the Communist Party of Cuba. 
 


 
Ernesto Che Guevara View titles by Ernesto Che Guevara
Introduction to the 2021 edition: The Motorcycle Diaries, or the Rediscovery of South America by Walter Salles
Foreword to the 2003 edition by Aleida Guevara
Foreword to the 1993 edition by Aleida March
Biography of Ernesto Che Guevara
Brief chronology of Ernesto Che Guevara
Map and Itinerary of The Motorcycle Diaries
Introduction by Cintio Vitier

The Motorcycle Diaries
So we understand each other
Forewarnings
Discovery of the ocean
. . . Lovesick pause
Until the last tie is broken
For the flu, bed
San Martín de los Andes
Circular exploration
Dear Mama
On the Seven Lakes Road
And now, I feel my great roots unearth, free and . . .
Objects of curiosity
The Experts
The difficulties intensify
La Poderosa II’s final tour
Firefighters, workers and other matters
La Gioconda’s smile
Stowaways
This time, disaster
Chuquicamata
Arid land for miles and miles
The end of Chile
Chile, a vision from afar
Tarata, the new world
In the dominions of Pachamama
Lake of the sun
Toward the navel of the world
The navel
The land of the Incas
Our Lord of the Earthquakes
Homeland for the victor
Cuzco straight
Huambo
Ever northward
Through the center of Peru
Shattered hopes
The city of the viceroys
Down the Ucayali
Dear Papi
The San Pablo leper colony
Saint Guevara’s day
Debut for the little Kontiki
Dear Mama
On the road to Caracas
This strange 20th century
A note in the margin

Appendix:
A child of my environment (Speech to medical students, 1960)
WALTER SALLES
introduction to the 2021 edition: the motorcycle diaries, or the rediscovery of south america

The first accounts of South America reported by Amerigo Vespucci and Pedro Álvares Cabral in the early sixteenth century describe an Edenic world. The lost El Dorado, the finis terrae of the Latins, ripe for colonization.

From this initial contradiction—how to submit an Edenic land to the designs of European invaders?—stems the majority of the continent’s structural imbalances: the massacre of indigenous tribes, the forced migration and enslavement of Africans obliged to work on monoculture plantations, and the haphazard drawing of borders between nations. This colonizing process, grounded in violence and slave labor, spawned societies whose references reflected essentially European beliefs and desires.


January 1952

When the young medical student Ernesto Guevara de la Serna (twenty-three years old) mounted the pillion of an old Norton 500 behind the biochemist Alberto Granado (twenty-nine years old), with the dream of crossing the South American continent, their understanding of the territory was limited to what history books had taught them. “We knew more about the Greeks and Phoenicians than we did about the Incas,” confessed the good-humored Granado. “We didn’t actually know the precise location of Machu Picchu.” The Motorcycle Diaries is at once a rare initiation into, and an unveiling of, a hitherto unknown reality, a unique and original physical and human geography.

Unlike the history told by the colonizers, the travel diaries of the young Ernesto begin as a picaresque account, a clin d’oeil to Cervantes, that gradually deepens as the two adventurers come into contact with the impure substance of the Latin American reality. When the social and political contradictions begin to unfurl, what started out as the diary of a road trip takes on unexpected contours: it transforms into a rite of passage that signals the gradual dawning of awareness in two Latin American youths witnessing the injustices and inequalities of a continent for the first time.

This shift becomes palpable when they reach Peru and discover the Andean and Incan heritage. It’s as if, at that moment, the course of their individual lives suddenly converges upon history with a capital H. That is when The Motorcycle Diaries veers wide of most travel accounts. The young men who reach their final destination at the continent’s northernmost tip, in Venezuela, are not the same youths who set out from their native Argentina.

Few accounts offer an expression of a sensibility this open to the world and so devoid of subterfuges. The Motorcycle Diaries provides valuable tools with which to understand how the young Ernesto could transform gradually into a political figure, with a keen perception of the afflictions suffered by those around him— and of the structural iniquities that caused them.

The Motorcycle Diaries enables an immersion into a territory as seen through its own eyes.

What unravels from it is a genuine, singular South American identity. Nearly seven decades after it was written, Ernesto Guevara’s diaries continue to present a fascinating and urgent reflection of what is still seen as a last frontier.

Walter Salles,
May 2021
Copyright © 2021 by Ernesto Che Guevara. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

Educator Guide for The Motorcycle Diaries

Classroom-based guides appropriate for schools and colleges provide pre-reading and classroom activities, discussion questions connected to the curriculum, further reading, and resources.

(Please note: the guide displayed here is the most recently uploaded version; while unlikely, any page citation discrepancies between the guide and book is likely due to pagination differences between a book’s different formats.)

Read More
"Most of the book is not explicitly political, but Guevara's profound radicalization is shown through his growing indignation toward American imperialism, the oppression of Indigenous people, and “profound tragedy circumscribing the life of the proletariat the world over” that he witnesses firsthand during his travels. Guevara went on to join Fidel Castro’s 1959 revolution against the Cuban government, eventually becoming the minister of industry in the new one-party Communist state. The Motorcycle Diaries is a coming-of-age story, an intimate glimpse at the beginning of one boy’s transformation into a man who some remember as a murderer and some remember as a martyr."
— Calla Walsh, Teen Vogue

About

A New York Times bestseller
With a new introduction by The Motorcyle Diaries filmmaker Walter Salles, and featuring 24 pages of photos taken by Che.

The Motorcycle Diaries is Che Guevara's diary of his journey to discover the continent of Latin America while still a medical student, setting out in 1952 on a vintage Norton motorcycle together with his friend Alberto Granado, a biochemist. It captures, arguably as much as any book ever written, the exuberance and joy of one person's youthful belief in the possibilities of humankind tending towards justice, peace and happiness.

After the release in 2004 of the exhilarating film of the same title, directed by Walter Salles, the book became a New York Times and international bestseller.

This edition includes a new introduction by Walter Salles and an array of new material that was assembled for the 2004 edition coinciding with the release of the film, including 24 pages of previously unpublished photos taken by Che, notes and comments by his wife, Aleida Guevara March, and an extensive introduction by the distinguished Cuban author, Cintio Vitier.


"A journey, a number of journeys. Ernesto Guevara in search of adventure, Ernesto Guevara in search of America, Ernesto Guevara in search of Che. On this journey, solitude found solidarity. 'I' turned into 'we.'"—Eduardo Galeano

"As his journey progresses, Guevara's voice seems to deepen, to darken, colored by what he witnesses in his travels. He is still poetic, but now he comments on what he sees, though still poetically, with a new awareness of the social and political ramifications of what's going on around him."—January Magazine

"Our film is about a young man, Che, falling in love with a continent and finding his place in it."
—Walter Salles, director of the film version of The Motorcycle Diaries

"All this wandering around 'Our America with a Capital A' has changed me more than I thought."
—Ernesto Che Guevara, from The Motorcycle Diaries

Author

ERNESTO GUEVARA DE LA SERNA was born in Rosario, Argentina, on June 14, 1928. While studying for a medical degree in Buenos Aires, he took a trip with his friend Alberto Granado on an old Norton motorcycle through all of Latin America, the basis for The Motorcycle Diaries. During his travels he witnessed the Bolivian revolution in 1953; and, in Guatemala in 1954, the overthrow of the democratically elected government of Jacobo Arbenz by US-backed forces. Forced to leave Guatemala, he went to Mexico City, where he linked up with exiled Cuban revolutionaries and met Fidel Castro in 1955. Che joined their expedition to Cuba, where the revolutionary war began in the Sierra Maestra mountains. At first Che was the troop doctor, and later became Rebel Army commander in July 1957.  Following the rebels’ victory on January 1, 1959, he was a key leader of the new revolutionary government and also of the political organization that in 1965 became the Communist Party of Cuba. 
 


 
Ernesto Che Guevara View titles by Ernesto Che Guevara

Table of Contents

Introduction to the 2021 edition: The Motorcycle Diaries, or the Rediscovery of South America by Walter Salles
Foreword to the 2003 edition by Aleida Guevara
Foreword to the 1993 edition by Aleida March
Biography of Ernesto Che Guevara
Brief chronology of Ernesto Che Guevara
Map and Itinerary of The Motorcycle Diaries
Introduction by Cintio Vitier

The Motorcycle Diaries
So we understand each other
Forewarnings
Discovery of the ocean
. . . Lovesick pause
Until the last tie is broken
For the flu, bed
San Martín de los Andes
Circular exploration
Dear Mama
On the Seven Lakes Road
And now, I feel my great roots unearth, free and . . .
Objects of curiosity
The Experts
The difficulties intensify
La Poderosa II’s final tour
Firefighters, workers and other matters
La Gioconda’s smile
Stowaways
This time, disaster
Chuquicamata
Arid land for miles and miles
The end of Chile
Chile, a vision from afar
Tarata, the new world
In the dominions of Pachamama
Lake of the sun
Toward the navel of the world
The navel
The land of the Incas
Our Lord of the Earthquakes
Homeland for the victor
Cuzco straight
Huambo
Ever northward
Through the center of Peru
Shattered hopes
The city of the viceroys
Down the Ucayali
Dear Papi
The San Pablo leper colony
Saint Guevara’s day
Debut for the little Kontiki
Dear Mama
On the road to Caracas
This strange 20th century
A note in the margin

Appendix:
A child of my environment (Speech to medical students, 1960)

Excerpt

WALTER SALLES
introduction to the 2021 edition: the motorcycle diaries, or the rediscovery of south america

The first accounts of South America reported by Amerigo Vespucci and Pedro Álvares Cabral in the early sixteenth century describe an Edenic world. The lost El Dorado, the finis terrae of the Latins, ripe for colonization.

From this initial contradiction—how to submit an Edenic land to the designs of European invaders?—stems the majority of the continent’s structural imbalances: the massacre of indigenous tribes, the forced migration and enslavement of Africans obliged to work on monoculture plantations, and the haphazard drawing of borders between nations. This colonizing process, grounded in violence and slave labor, spawned societies whose references reflected essentially European beliefs and desires.


January 1952

When the young medical student Ernesto Guevara de la Serna (twenty-three years old) mounted the pillion of an old Norton 500 behind the biochemist Alberto Granado (twenty-nine years old), with the dream of crossing the South American continent, their understanding of the territory was limited to what history books had taught them. “We knew more about the Greeks and Phoenicians than we did about the Incas,” confessed the good-humored Granado. “We didn’t actually know the precise location of Machu Picchu.” The Motorcycle Diaries is at once a rare initiation into, and an unveiling of, a hitherto unknown reality, a unique and original physical and human geography.

Unlike the history told by the colonizers, the travel diaries of the young Ernesto begin as a picaresque account, a clin d’oeil to Cervantes, that gradually deepens as the two adventurers come into contact with the impure substance of the Latin American reality. When the social and political contradictions begin to unfurl, what started out as the diary of a road trip takes on unexpected contours: it transforms into a rite of passage that signals the gradual dawning of awareness in two Latin American youths witnessing the injustices and inequalities of a continent for the first time.

This shift becomes palpable when they reach Peru and discover the Andean and Incan heritage. It’s as if, at that moment, the course of their individual lives suddenly converges upon history with a capital H. That is when The Motorcycle Diaries veers wide of most travel accounts. The young men who reach their final destination at the continent’s northernmost tip, in Venezuela, are not the same youths who set out from their native Argentina.

Few accounts offer an expression of a sensibility this open to the world and so devoid of subterfuges. The Motorcycle Diaries provides valuable tools with which to understand how the young Ernesto could transform gradually into a political figure, with a keen perception of the afflictions suffered by those around him— and of the structural iniquities that caused them.

The Motorcycle Diaries enables an immersion into a territory as seen through its own eyes.

What unravels from it is a genuine, singular South American identity. Nearly seven decades after it was written, Ernesto Guevara’s diaries continue to present a fascinating and urgent reflection of what is still seen as a last frontier.

Walter Salles,
May 2021
Copyright © 2021 by Ernesto Che Guevara. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

Guides

Educator Guide for The Motorcycle Diaries

Classroom-based guides appropriate for schools and colleges provide pre-reading and classroom activities, discussion questions connected to the curriculum, further reading, and resources.

(Please note: the guide displayed here is the most recently uploaded version; while unlikely, any page citation discrepancies between the guide and book is likely due to pagination differences between a book’s different formats.)

Read More

Praise

"Most of the book is not explicitly political, but Guevara's profound radicalization is shown through his growing indignation toward American imperialism, the oppression of Indigenous people, and “profound tragedy circumscribing the life of the proletariat the world over” that he witnesses firsthand during his travels. Guevara went on to join Fidel Castro’s 1959 revolution against the Cuban government, eventually becoming the minister of industry in the new one-party Communist state. The Motorcycle Diaries is a coming-of-age story, an intimate glimpse at the beginning of one boy’s transformation into a man who some remember as a murderer and some remember as a martyr."
— Calla Walsh, Teen Vogue

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