*The Motorcycle Diaries*
*by Che Guevara*
Che Guevara, for me, was a childhood idol.
India was left of centre initially, during the Nehruvian Era. During the Indira years, it became authoritarian and centrist. Rajiv Gandhi moved it slowly to the right, and during the Narasimha Rao/ Manmohan Singh Era, it became unabashedly right liberal. And with the advent of Modi, the country has moved further to the right; it has also become authoritarian, just one notch down from a certain European country under the regime of a guy with a toothbrush moustache.
But my home state of Kerala, located down at the bottom, has remained staunchly liberal. And secular. And left-wing. In fact, we were the first electorate in the world to democratically elect a communist government to power; and it is the only state where the communists are in power now.
My generation grew up hearing the heroic tales of the October Revolution and the Long March. Marx, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Castro et al were our role models. Our sacred texts were _Das Kapital_ and _The Communist Manifesto._ And Che, undoubtedly, was the mythical hero. The revolutionary par excellence, who threw away a lucrative career as a doctor; and eschewed a position as a minister in a newborn socialist country, just to plunge into the battlefield to liberate Latin America from the greedy clutches of Uncle Sam - and to die a martyr, looking into the eyes of the American GI who shot him, saying: "Shoot, coward, you are killing only a man."
As I grew older, I understood that truth was a little more nuanced, and that there were no blacks and whites, only greys - and that revolutionaries and communists were not all that they were cracked up to be. But my fascination with Che remained, even when idealistic youth transformed into disillusioned middle-age and then to the current jaded and cynical sixties. Because, you see, this revolutionary is no longer a man but a symbol.
Every hero undergoes a journey. He enters it as a raw novitiate and after the road of trials and tribulations, emerges as a sage. This trope is a staple of most myths and epics, and also of a lot of popular narratives in novels, TV and film. We rarely see it in real life. Che is one of the rare exceptions.
In December 1951, 23-year-old Ernesto Guevara and his friend Alberto Granado, both medical doctors, set off on an epic journey across South America on the latter's Norton 500 bike, named "La Poderosa II". The journey was ostensibly to visit leper colonies and study the disease: the real intention was just to have a good time: two red-blooded Latinos whooping it up, wining, dining and fornicating. But when it ended 1n August 1952, Ernesto had transformed into a man who was deeply disturbed by the distressing history of his unfortunate continent: twice enslaved, once physically by Europe and then economically by the USA, her riches bled dry to fill foreign coffers while her sons and daughters lived in abject misery.
As we read these memoirs which he kept during the journey, we can feel the change almost physically. The initial notes which are mostly about their mischievous escapades, slowly give way to long, thoughtful passages about the condition of the poor in Latin America, and the proletariat in general. For example, see how he describes a sick woman here:
> I went to see an old woman with asthma, a customer at La Gioconda. The poor thing was in a pitiful state, breathing the acrid smell of concentrated sweat and dirty feet that filled her room, mixed with the dust from a couple of armchairs, the only luxury items in her house. On top of her asthma, she had a heart condition. It is at times like this, when a doctor is conscious of his complete powerlessness, that he longs for change: a change to prevent the injustice of a system in which only a month ago this poor woman was still earning her living as a waitress, wheezing and panting but facing life with dignity. In circumstances like this, individuals in poor families who can't pay their way become surrounded by an atmosphere of barely disguised acrimony; they stop being father, mother, sister or brother and become a purely negative factor in the struggle for life and consequently, a source of bitterness for the healthy members of the community who resent their illness as if it were a personal insult to those who have to support them. It is there, in the final moments, for people whose farthest horizon has always been tomorrow, that one comprehends the profound tragedy circumscribing the life of the proletariat the world over. In those dying eyes there is a submissive appeal for forgiveness and also, often, a desperate plea for consolation which is lost to the void, just as their body will soon be lost in the magnitude of mystery surrounding us.
Or a Chilean couple, who couldn't find a decent job and were forced to live a pitiful existence, because they were members of the banned communist party:
> There we made friends with a married couple, Chilean workers who were communists. By the light of the single candle illuminating us, drinking mate and eating a piece of bread and cheese, the man's shrunken figure carried a mysterious, tragic air. In his simple and expressive language he recounted his three months in prison, and told us about his starving wife who stood by him with exemplary loyalty, his children left in the care of a kindly neighbor, his fruitless pilgrimage in search of work and his _compañeros_ , mysteriously disappeared and said to be somewhere at the bottom of the sea.
> The couple, numb with cold, huddling against each other in the desert night, were a living representation of the proletariat in any part of the world. They had not one single miserable blanket to cover themselves with, so we gave them one of ours and Alberto and I wrapped the other around us as best we could. It was one of the coldest times in my life, but also one which made me feel a little more brotherly toward this strange, for me anyway, human species.
The starving man is willing to share his frugal meal with the bums because "he, too, is a tramp." As Che says, he probably didn't understand what communism meant: but he could understand the slogan, "bread for the poor"!
By the time they reach Cuzco and Machu Picchu in Peru, Guevara has become acutely conscious of the rich Indian past of the continent, which the Spanish conquistadors destroyed mercilessly. However, he says that the hybrid culture that the mixing of the invaders with the indigenous people created was not like the insular one of North America, with the natives totally segregated and marginalised: Latin America was one nation, one people, even though separated into different countries through arbitrarily drawn boundaries. When Che talks of a defeated people who live on when there is nothing to live for, just because "living has become a habit", we understand the depth of compassion which kindled the fire within.
Read this book to understand the making of a revolutionary.
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