Before the Revolution: A Review of “The Motorcycle Diaries” by Ernesto Che Guevara

ByPeter Joeseph 'Briefcase Maker' Kalafatis
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The motorcycle behind the title was a 1939 Norton 500cc known as La Poderosa II, “The Mighty One.” It broke down repeatedly in Chile, gave out for good in Peru, and the trip it started carried on by truck, by raft and by hitched ride. The bike supplies the title. The road supplies the book.

Ernesto Guevara was 23 and still a medical student when he set out with Alberto Granado, a 29-year-old biochemist. By the time he was executed in Bolivia in 1967, the world knew him simply as “Che.” The Motorcycle Diaries is what he wrote before any of that happened, and it reads like a document from before: funny, restless, and increasingly angry at what it sees.

The Author and the Long Wait for Publication

Guevara was born in Rosario, Argentina, in 1928 and took his medical degree in June 1953, the year after the trip ended. He was killed at La Higuera, Bolivia, on October 9, 1967, and the diary did not reach print in his lifetime. It surfaced in the 1990s.

The first Spanish edition, titled Notas de viaje, was published in Havana by Casa Editora Abril in 1993. Ann Wright’s English translation followed from Verso in 1995 (one library listing gives 1996). In 2003 Ocean Press, working with the Che Guevara Studies Center in Havana, issued a new edition with a preface by Aleida Guevara, the author’s daughter, and an introduction by the Cuban poet Cintio Vitier. The paperback linked at the top of this page is the 2021 Seven Stories Press edition, which Open Library lists with Wright as translator.

Aleida Guevara wrote in 2004 that her father never intended the diary for publication, and that what survived was a bundle of typed pages. Granado kept his own account. Con el Che por Sudamérica appeared in 1978, and an English edition, Travelling with Che Guevara, followed in 2003. Born in 1922 in Hernando, Córdoba, Granado later moved to Cuba, helped found the medical faculty at the University of Santiago de Cuba, and died in Havana in 2011.

Open-pit copper mine in the Atacama Desert at dusk with terraced walls

Two Friends and a Failing Norton

They left Argentina at the turn of 1951–52. Granado’s own count begins on December 29, while most accounts of the book say January 1952. Over roughly nine months they covered more than 8,000 kilometers (about 5,000 miles) through Argentina, Chile, Peru, Colombia and Venezuela. In Chile, with the Norton failing, they presented themselves in local newspapers as leprosy specialists, and communities helped them along.

At the Chuquicamata copper mine in northern Chile, a mine run by American companies, Guevara met a blacklisted Communist couple shivering in the desert night. He later called them “a live representation of the proletariat.” The encounter, as LitCharts summarizes it, deepened his sympathy for communism, and it is the first place in the book where the politics stop being background.

Peru took the motorcycle for good. It also gave Guevara Cusco and Machu Picchu, where he reflected on how an Inca civilization survived colonial erasure. Through a Lima doctor, Hugo Pesce, the pair arranged to work at the San Pablo leper colony on the Peruvian Amazon in June 1952. There Guevara turned 24, and, in the episode most often retold, swam across the Amazon to reach the patients’ side of the colony. They left on a raft, the Mambo-Tango, bound for Leticia, Colombia.

The friends split in Caracas. Granado stayed in Venezuela and took a job at a leprosarium in Maiquetiía. Guevara flew to Miami, then home to Buenos Aires after a delay of about a month.

What the Book Is Actually About

Guevara opens by warning off anyone expecting an epic. His note, “So We Understand Each Other,” calls the book a record of something smaller:

“…two lives running parallel for a time, with similar hopes and convergent dreams.”

(Guevara, from the opening note; Ocean Press translation.)

That modesty is the method. The politics arrive sideways: a mine owned by foreign firms, a couple with nowhere warm to sleep, a colony where the doctors and the sick live on opposite banks of a river. Nothing is announced in advance, and the education happens a few chapters before the author notices it.

The same note contains the sentence most worth keeping in mind while reading. Guevara says he reorganized and polished the notes after the trip, and that the man who wrote them, in his words, “passed away the moment his feet touched Argentine soil again.” The line announces a change, and it concedes something else: the narrator reading back over his own diary is already someone other than the traveler in it. Anyone treating the book as a pure transcript of 1952 should read it with that in mind.

The most openly political scene comes on June 14, 1952, Guevara’s 24th birthday at San Pablo. After dinner and pisco, according to LitCharts’ summary, he tells the colony that Latin Americans belong to a single mestizo people, that national borders are fictions, and he finishes by toasting Peru and a united Latin America.

Readers disagree on what the book mostly is. Gary Ilminen, reviewing it in 2025 for the Riders Library series at Ultimate Motorcycling, found an easygoing, humorous adventure story and was surprised how little politics it contains given Guevara’s later reputation. Jonah Raskin, writing on the 2021 edition for CounterPunch, reads the same pages as a transformation from would-be swashbuckler into a champion of the poor, and he does not hide the awkward parts: Guevara drinks heavily, chases women, and at times describes Indigenous people as dirty and Black people as lazy. Both readings find support in the text.

From Page to Screen: Salles’s 2004 Film

Walter Salles directed the film version from a screenplay by José Rivera, adapted from both Guevara’s diary and Granado’s memoir. Gael García Bernal plays Guevara. Rodrigo de la Serna, Guevara’s second cousin on his mother’s side, plays Granado. Granado advised Salles, followed the crew as they retraced the route, and appears as himself in a short cameo near the end. The production filmed at the real San Pablo colony, and the river swim took three nights to shoot on the Amazon.

The film premiered at Sundance on January 15, 2004, competed at Cannes that May, where Salles won the Prize of the Ecumenical Jury, and opened in the United States on September 24, 2004. Jorge Drexler won the Academy Award for Best Original Song for “Al otro lado del río,” Rivera was nominated for adapted screenplay, and the film took the BAFTA for Best Film Not in the English Language. Granado was denied a U.S. visa and missed the Sundance premiere, though he attended Cannes.

It is not a transcription. Raskin argues the film smooths over some of the diary’s rougher edges and moves the emotional peak to the leper colony, where the book itself peaks at Machu Picchu. Critics outside the film’s admirers went further: Anthony Daniels called it “morally monstrous and emotionally trivial,” on the grounds that it glorifies Guevara.

Machu Picchu at dawn with mist between the stone terraces

Watch: Machu Picchu in the Film

The clip below shows the film’s Machu Picchu sequence, the stop Raskin identifies as the book’s high point.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is The Motorcycle Diaries a true story?
Yes. It is Guevara’s own account of the 1951–52 trip with Granado, built from notes taken on the road and, by his own admission in the opening note, reworked afterward.

How far did they travel?
More than 8,000 kilometers (about 5,000 miles) over roughly nine months, ending in Venezuela for Granado and, for Guevara, with a flight through Miami back to Buenos Aires.

What happened to the motorcycle?
La Poderosa II failed repeatedly in Chile and broke down for good in Peru. After that the two travelled by truck, by raft and by hitched ride.

Did Guevara write it to be published?
According to his daughter, Aleida Guevara, no. She has said it was a bundle of typed pages that her father never meant for print. The first Spanish edition came out in Havana in 1993.

Is the 2004 film faithful to the book?
Broadly, though it is not a transcription. Salles and Rivera drew on both Guevara’s and Granado’s memoirs, and Raskin argues the film smooths the diary’s rougher edges and relocates its climax to the leper colony.

Who was Alberto Granado?
An Argentine biochemist, born in 1922, who made the trip with Guevara, wrote his own account, and later helped found a medical faculty in Cuba. He died in Havana in 2011.

Worn leather satchel, notebook, paper map and round glasses on a rough wooden table

Where to Read It

Motorcycle Diaries: Notes on a Latin American Journey (affiliate link). This is the 2021 Seven Stories Press edition, the same book the buy button at the top of the page links to.

Further Reading

Alanna McFall, a Bay Area novelist and playwright, reviewed the book on her own blog in May 2019. Asked whether she would recommend it, she answered, “No, unless you are independently interested in Guevara’s life.” She values it as a historical document rather than as literature, which makes it a useful counterweight to the book’s reputation.

Jonah Raskin’s “How Ernesto Guevara Became ‘Che’: The Motorcycle Diaries Revisited” (CounterPunch, reprinted in Janata Weekly, September 2021) argues the diary is a better guide to Guevara’s evolution than either the film or the biographies.

Gary Ilminen’s Riders Library review at Ultimate Motorcycling (March 2025) reads the book as a motorcycle story first, with the Norton’s breakdowns at the center.

Sources

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