Paulo Drinot is Senior Lecturer in Latin American History at the Institute of the Americas, University College London. He is the author of The Allure of Labor: Workers, Race, and the Making of the Peruvian State, also published by Duke University Press.

Che’s Travels

The Making of a Revolutionary in 1950s Latin America

Duke University Press

Copyright © 2010 Duke University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-4748-4

Contents

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………1PAULO DRINOT Introduction………………………………………………………………………………………………………….21EDUARDO ELENA Point of Departure: Travel and Nationalism in Ernesto Guevara’s Argentina…………………………………………………..53PATIENCE A. SCHELL Beauty and Bounty in Che’s Chile…………………………………………………………………………………..88PAULO DRINOT Awaiting the Blood of a Truly Emancipating Revolution: Che Guevara in 1950s Peru……………………………………………..127MALCOLM DEAS “Putting Up” with Violence: Ernesto Guevara, Guevarismo, and Colombia……………………………………………………….148JUDITH EWELL Che Guevara and Venezuela: Tourist, Guerrilla Mentor, and Revolutionary Spirit……………………………………………….181ANN ZULAWSKI The National Revolution and Bolivia in the 1950s: What Did Che See?…………………………………………………………210CINDY FORSTER “Not in All of America Can There Be Found a Country as Democratic as This One”: Che and Revolution in Guatemala…………………245ERIC ZOLOV Between Bohemianism and a Revolutionary Rebirth: Che Guevara in Mexico………………………………………………………..283CONTRIBUTORS………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………285

Chapter One

Eduardo Elena

Point of Departure

Travel and Nationalism in Ernesto Guevara’s Argentina

The story of Che Guevara is one of a series of personal transformations-from asthmatic youth to medical student, and then to wanderer, guerrillero, revolutionary leader, and, finally, martyr. The fundamental role played by travel throughout these changes is widely acknowledged. In fact, the one constant in Guevara’s short life was its unsettled nature: he never remained long in one place during his youth, and he moved from country to country as an adult, embarking on one voyage or mission after another. In the standard account of his life story, it is the 1951-52 journey across South America that marked Guevara’s political awakening as he was pulled away from his familiar life in Argentina and exposed to a continent of brutal extremes. This trip-recounted in Guevara’s private journal and published after his death (and more recently in English as The Motorcycle Diaries)-has thus attracted great attention from biographers, commentators, and filmmakers. For all the insights provided by these works, however, they usually consider this voyage in isolation, as an assertion of willful independence. Such an interpretation hardly seems surprising, given that Guevara’s self-presentation encourages this view, and it would later feed into the cult of heroism of El Che. But one is left with a distorted picture of an individual moving freely through a static landscape, as if he were the only historical actor in motion during this time and place. As a consequence, we fail to see Guevara’s position within the broader social field of his homeland Argentina and the rest of Latin America, a region whose population was increasingly on the move in the post-Second World War era.

This essay aims to situate Guevara the traveler in the historical context of 1950s Argentina. In particular, it examines his early journeys from the vantage of two major contemporary trends: mid-twentieth-century mass migration and tourism; and the nationalist politics of the Peronist era (1943-55). This approach is premised on the assumption that to understand this particular traveler, one must examine his point of departure-in other words, the possibilities open to him at this moment and the conditions that he reacted against. Guevara came of age in a time marked by the regular movement of people across Argentina, from rural residents relocating to urban areas to short-term leisure travel. His decision to traverse vast expanses of his home country and Latin America can be seen in sharper relief by investigating these social displacements and cultural trends that accompanied them. This essay considers these historical subjects primarily through Guevara’s earliest travel writings. During the journeys of his youth in Argentina, Guevara formulated his travel method-as reflected in his choice of itinerary, modes of transportation, and contact with the physical landscape and its inhabitants. Method is perhaps too rigorous a term to describe these wanderings, but it serves the useful purpose of grouping together his habits and preferences as a traveler, all of which reveal much about postwar Argentina and Guevara’s place within it.

This type of historical analysis runs the danger of being reductive, that is, of explaining individual thought and action as the automatic outcome of structural pressures, political forces, and abstract social categories. To be sure, a measure of “sociologizing” may be welcome in this case, if only to counteract the inevitable mythologizing of El Che. But as we shall see, one of the distinguishing features of Guevara’s early travels was, in fact, their anticonformist character. His ambitious trek across South America, on a minimal budget and just shy of earning his medical degree, clearly bucked convention. At the most obvious level, he pursued a self-conscious goal to evade acceptable practices of tourism. Although Guevara’s rebellion was not yet aimed at fomenting revolution, his travels offered a gesture of rejection against prevailing class norms, cultural expectations, and the political trends of the 1950s. In contesting certain features of this milieu, however, Guevara continued to cling to others, and his travel writings reflect earlier paradigms of exploration and affinities with contemporary nationalist perspectives.

In keeping with the objectives of this volume, the essay also departs from a purely biographical analysis by reconsidering the history of postwar Argentina from the vantage of Guevara’s travel accounts. The pages that follow will consider which central historical developments in his homeland Guevara saw (and which ones he did not see). Principal among these was the eruption of Peronism as the nation’s largest political force. Discussions of Guevara’s youth have tended to revolve around his somewhat perplexing distance from the partisan convulsions of Peronist rule. Nevertheless, a closer look at Guevara’s travel writings reveals the inroads made by Peronist politics into everyday life across the national territory. Juan and Eva Per’s government accelerated ongoing social trends, such as urbanization, rural migration, and popular tourism (partly through state-sponsored programs). Despite his best efforts the young Guevara found it impossible to extricate himself fully from Peronism, even after he left behind his country’s borders.

The essay begins by considering Guevara’s place in the history of migration and travel in mid-twentieth-century Argentina. It then probes Peronist-era trends that shaped the parameter of his travels (such as the nationalist fascination with rural spaces). It concludes with a brief discussion of Guevara’s return to Argentina as El Che, the embodiment of revolutionary action. There are a number of obstacles to examining Guevara and his travels in this manner. One relies by necessity on a critical reading of Guevara’s own writings, yet they reflect the priorities of a youth seeking adventure in foreign lands, rather than meditations on his homeland. While Guevara and his companion Alberto Granado devoted more than a month to crisscrossing southern Argentina, the journals that comprise The Motorcycle Diaries are devoted primarily to their experiences elsewhere. In addition, these travel writings have a complicated provenance, which makes it difficult to address the scope of subsequent revisions and editing. With an awareness of these interpretive dilemmas, the current essay draws on the Diaries and a range of other materials: additional Guevara writings, Peronist-era political and cultural sources, and secondary biographical works. What emerges from this analysis is a better appreciation for the historical significance of Guevara’s choices as a traveler, including how his earliest journeys within Argentina blazed the trail for encounters elsewhere in Latin America.

On the Road in Argentina

Contrary to conventional wisdom, the 1951-52 journey recounted in The Motorcycle Diaries did not constitute Guevara’s first travel experience, nor even his first trip abroad. As his biographers have shown, Guevara traveled extensively in his teenage years and early twenties, covering thousands of kilometers across Argentina by hitchhiking, bicycling, and other means. Along the way he crossed paths with other Argentines circulating throughout their country in ever larger numbers. Such is the emphasis on Guevara’s exceptionality, however, that few observers have stopped to consider his relationship to these travelers or to the phenomenon of postwar migration more generally. In fact, Guevara took pains to distinguish himself from his contemporaries and embraced a different paradigm of travel, shaped by readings of explorer accounts, conversations with political refugees, and youthful adventures on a shoestring budget. It is therefore hard to imagine Guevara in the shadow of mass migration, to see him surrounded by crowds at a train station or lingering with vacationers at a popular resort. Yet his writings reveal glimpses of encounters not only with rural migrants seeking work but also with other urban Argentines who had taken to the road in search of leisure. Guevara’s reactions to these chance meetings suggest much about his own social position and effort to define an alternative approach to travel.

Migration was a way of life for Guevara and his family. Both of his parents came from privileged backgrounds and boasted distinguished family names, but they were the downwardly mobile black sheep of the fold. Financial pressures contributed to an unsettled upbringing for the family’s children, albeit one still characterized by middle-class comforts and connections to wealthy relatives. As the household provider, Ernesto Guevara Lynch went from one failed business venture to the next, and the family moved frequently within Argentina. Born in the city of Rosario, the future Che grew up on a yerba mate plantation in Misiones, in the provincial hill town of Alta Gracia, and in the metropolises of Cdoba and Buenos Aires-in addition to living through shorter stays elsewhere in Argentina and through countless visits to relatives and friends. Guevara’s vagabond tendencies later in life can be traced further back as well. On both sides of the family tree ancestors had journeyed far and wide across Argentina, Chile, and even the United States. Ernesto’s favorite grandmother would entertain him for hours with stories of her father’s experiences as an exile from the regime of the nineteenth-century Argentine dictator Juan Manuel de Rosas and of his time living in California during the 1840s gold rush. A string of visitors in the 1930s and 1940s brought more tales of adventure in foreign lands. In particular, the Guevara family hosted ex-combatants from the Spanish Civil War whose stories of the Republic’s brave struggles against right-wing nationalists captivated the young Ernesto.

Equally important, the written word proved integral to Guevara’s formation as a traveler. The family library was stocked with scores of travel chronicles and related books. Confined to the indoors for long periods of time due to asthma and other illnesses, Guevara became a devoted reader and spent hours poring over books by Jules Verne, adventure fiction, and more esoteric works on scientific expeditions and missions. (By his teenage years he had also familiarized himself with Karl Marx and other leftist authors, but his readings were extremely eclectic and his interests dispersed.) For the remainder of his life Guevara would keep journals of his voyages as a traveling routine, often revising them on his return. He rarely traveled without bringing books along. In a remarkable essay on Guevara the reader, Ricardo Piglia describes a photograph illustrating the centrality of the written word for Guevara later in life: close to his final days, while seeking to spark a guerrilla war in Bolivia and pursued by counterinsurgency forces, Guevara was pictured sitting in a tree reading a book. Even with the enemy closing in, suffering from exhaustion and wounds, he continued to carry books and diaries in a folder strapped to his body. Most incredibly, reading and writing were among Guevara’s last recorded acts. After his capture and only hours prior to his execution, he was visited by a teacher, who offered him some food as he lay dying in the classroom of a rural school; Guevara asked her to correct a misspelling of a sentence on the blackboard: “I know how to read.”

The most famous of Guevara’s writings-The Motorcycle Diaries, as well as the accounts of his Congo and Bolivian campaigns-can be added to the canon of Argentine travel writing, a tradition that includes essential works such as Domingo Faustino Sarmiento’s Facundo and Lucio V. Mansilla’s A Visit to the Ranquel Indians. At times Guevara’s accounts suggest a conscious awareness of this literary tradition and precocious attempts to situate himself within it. The opening salvo of the Diaries declares, “The person who wrote these notes passed away the moment his feet touched Argentine soil again. The person who reorganizes and polishes them, me, is no longer, at least I am not the person I once was. All this wandering around ‘Our America with a capital A’ has changed me more than I thought”-an allusion perhaps to another celebrated writer-traveler-revolutionary, the Cuban nationalist Jos Mart and his classic work, Our America. In any event, this passage captures the complex function of travel for Guevara, for whom the physical experience of the voyage remained inseparable from reading and writing about travel, each sphere of activity continually informing the others.

Like that of his celebrated literary precursors, Guevara’s approach to travel was shaped by his relatively privileged social position. Gender factors into the equation here not only in the desire for sexual adventure evidenced clearly in The Motorcycle Diaries (Guevara and Granado appear concerned as much with unlocking the mysteries of the continent as adding to their conquests with foreign women). More important, the text highlights the supreme confidence that guided Guevara’s travels, the freedom with which he transgressed both social norms and spatial boundaries, an ease facilitated by his position as a male in 1950s Argentine society. Guevara’s recklessness and romanticism as a traveler follow in the tradition of nineteenth-century male voyagers of a similar class and educational background. Within Argentine letters Guevara’s travels have more in common in tone with those of a figure like Mansilla (who journeyed across much of Europe and Asia in his youth, before being sent on his famed expedition into Argentina’s Indian territories) than, say, those of Juana Manuela Gorriti (who ranged widely across South America in the nineteenth century but is best known for her keen observations of postindependence society). Guevara’s journals appear to echo, whether intentionally or not, Mansilla’s combination of puffed-up arrogance and self-deprecating humor in the face of adversity.

Exposed to a range of travel experiences (physical and literary) during his upbringing, Guevara further established his preferences as a wanderer during his excursions across Argentina in the 1940s and 1950s. While in school he often hitchhiked hundreds of miles from Crdoba and Buenos Aires to visit friends and family. In his early twenties he took a part-time job as a medic on ships that sailed as far as northern Brazil and Jamaica (though little is known about these trips). But Guevara’s most ambitious experience before his Latin American journey with Granado was a solo trek on a motorized bicycle across Argentina in 1950. Descriptions of this trip survive in a short travel diary uncovered after Guevara’s death. His father discovered these notes in a box of old notebooks in the family’s Buenos Aires apartment. Although the paper was damaged and the young Ernesto’s handwriting is difficult to decipher, Guevara Lynch transcribed the original document and published excerpts of it in his memoir, Mi hijo El Che. As with The Motorcycle Diaries, there are unanswered questions as to how accurately this account reflects the original (in this case, at least, there appear to have been fewer possibilities for editing from Cuban authorities). Nevertheless, this earliest surviving travel diary can serve as a crucial source for understanding the characteristics of Guevara the traveler.

For those familiar with the Diaries the account of 1950 possesses basic similarities. Much of the travelogue recounts the difficulties encountered by the twenty-two-year-old: the mechanical troubles with his bike, the perils of traversing a huge geographic expanse, and his endurance of the natural elements. The text offers vignettes of the landscape, anecdotes about the characters Guevara meets, and descriptions of medical centers along the way (including the leprosarium where Granado worked). In six weeks Guevara covered four thousand kilometers, passing through twelve provinces but spending the majority of his time in the northwestern region of Salta, Tucumn, and Santiago del Estero. What comes through in this text, as in his subsequent travel writings, is Guevara’s desire to find far-flung corners of the countryside and to spend time among the “ordinary,” impoverished residents. Through forays into remote areas, Guevara expected the revelation of hidden aspects of social reality.

It is thus noteworthy that Guevara did not fully “see” a major social trend (or at least comment on it in his writings) reshaping these provincial areas. The 1950s were a time of internal migration on a massive scale, and rural populations headed by the millions to the cities; their main destination was Buenos Aires and its suburbs, the hub for industrial, commercial, and government employment. Migration was nothing new in Argentina; the countryside’s inhabitants covered vast distances seeking ranching and harvest labor in the nineteenth century, and large-scale European immigration at the turn of the century transformed social structures. But the pace of internal migration built steadily to reach new highs in the postwar era. According to official estimates the metropolitan region of Buenos Aires received annually about 8,000 migrants from the provinces in the mid-1930s; by the early 1940s this number had grown to 70,000, and by 1947 to more than 117,000 provincial migrants a year. This trend continued well into the 1950s and 1960s, and technically speaking the Guevara family’s relocation to Buenos Aires city from Crdoba made them part of this exodus.

In his decision to investigate the heartland of Argentina, Guevara went against the predominant demographic trend. Given his fondness for travel, it surprises that he had very little to say about migration in his writings. In part, Guevara’s travel method may explain this lacuna. He preferred to avoid large cities and devoted little time in his journals to describing metropolitan spaces or their inhabitants. In searching for ever more distant areas, Guevara was guided by a desire for contact with rural folk, those Argentines living close to the land and far from the harried urban world familiar to him. That these people were headed in increasing numbers from the countryside and towns to the big cities went against Guevara’s very purpose of seeking their places of origin.

(Continues…)

Excerpted from Che’s Travels Copyright © 2010 by Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.