The Motorcycle Diaries

4 ideas

1. The communist miner couple at Chuquicamata

   On the way to the Chuquicamata copper mine in the Atacama Desert, Guevara and Granado spend a cold night with a homeless Chilean miner and his wife who were being persecuted for their Communist Party membership and were travelling in search of any work, sharing a single blanket with them. The mine itself was owned by the US-run Anaconda company, and there Guevara saw workers hired and dismissed by the day in lethal conditions. He writes that the couple was 'a living representation of the proletariat in any part of the world,' and that whatever the danger of communism to society, its growth came from real hunger.

2. Crossing the river at San Pablo

   At the San Pablo leper colony in the Peruvian Amazon, the staff lived on one bank of the river and the patients were segregated on the other. The doctors on staff wore gloves, but Guevara and Granado shook patients' hands and played football with them bare-handed.

3. Latin America as one mestizo nation

   In a toast at the leper colony, Guevara argues that the division of Latin America into separate nations is 'uncertain and illusory.' He holds that a single mestizo people, from Mexico to the Strait of Magellan, shares common features of ethnicity, colonial history and exploitation. On this view, national borders hide one shared condition and so also hide a shared political fate.

4. Travel strips away the observer's insulation

   Travelling cheaply by broken motorcycle, hitchhiking and cargo boat, and depending on strangers for food and shelter, forces the traveller into the living conditions of the poor instead of watching them from hotels or books. This shared precariousness turns abstract knowledge of injustice into personal testimony. Guevara frames the change as irreversible: 'I am not I any more,' because the person who wrote the notes had stopped existing by the time he returned.

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