Freedom Socialist • Vol. 25, No. 5 • December 2004-January 2005
MOVIE REVIEW
Motorcycle Diaries: Che Guevara and the romance of revolutionby Megan Cornish
Craig Johnson The Motorcycle Diaries is a sensitive and understated new film that tells the true-to-life coming-of-age story of a 10-month trip around Latin America made by 23-year-old Ernesto Guevera, who was to become "Che."
Che Guevera was second in importance only to Fidel Castro in the early years of the Cuban revolution. Since his death in Bolivia in 1967, he has become an icon of international liberation struggles.
A journey toward consciousness. Director Walter Salles hews closely to Che’s actual diaries of the trip and to the account by his companion, Alberto Granado.
Wonderful atmospheric photography conveys the vast and stunning beauty of the land — and the pointlessness of the invisible boundaries between countries. The two men’s personal encounters have an intimacy that highlights the individuals they meet at the same time that it brings out the poverty and oppression they see.
The young men are looking for adventure and romance, but find lines of indigenous people trudging mountain roads, homeless in their own land. They interview an Indian woman who remembers when her people made a good living farming instead of scraping by selling handicrafts. They meet a peasant couple who have also been driven off their land and must beg for work in the brutal mines; communists, they have many friends who have been disappeared.
The wanderers visit the ruins of the once magnificent Inca city of Machu Picchu, comparing it to the vast slums of Lima in Peru created by the conquerors. Tellingly, Alberto dreams of a peaceful return to the glories of the past, while Ernesto says bluntly, "Without guns? Never!"
The limits of idealism. Often, Che’s reaction to the oppression he sees is demonstrated rather than verbalized. His acute sense of the poverty and isolation of lepers going to their colony builds as he repeatedly looks back from the comfortable deck of his boat at their rickety, crowded one being towed behind.
Mexican actor Gael Garcia Bernal conveys Che’s sensitivity, magnetism, daring, and brutal honesty with a mastery of his own (although I confess I picture a more brash and macho Che).
Above all, The Motorcycle Diaries shows Che’s change in sensibility during this trip, the beginning of his evolution into a revolutionary. It illuminates Che’s most famous quote: "At the risk of sounding ridiculous, let me say that the true revolutionary is guided by a great feeling of love."
This love caused him to commit unconditionally to international revolution. It made him an avowed Marxist, who recognized that the wealthy will not give up their dominance through lessons in "civil society." It gave him a visceral hostility to Stalinist bureaucratism, and led him to try (unsuccessfully) to diversify Cuba’s economy so that it would not be dependent on the USSR.
Passionately attached to the oppressed, Che took an idealist rather than materialist approach to their struggles.
He wrote about the "new socialist man," making a moral appeal for personal transformation as a prerequisite to achieving socialism. But in fact, society has to be changed in order to open up human potential. People need jobs, housing, healthcare and education in order to transform; Cuba has in many ways provided an example of this.
The same romantic idealism led Che to the strategy of revolution through guerrilla warfare, which he emphasized over workingclass organization, a failing shared by Fidel. The model of the guerrilla vanguard igniting revolution was only the apparent cause of the Cuban revolution’s success. In reality, the armed struggle was backed up with massive popular support and a general strike.
In Bolivia Che’s guerrillas were isolated, because workers were not organized to rise up. Che’s miscalculation not only led to his own death, but was emulated by revolutionaries throughout Latin America, and has consistently failed.
Building on Che’s legacy. The Motorcycle Diaries is an intriguing look at the political birth of a major revolutionary of our time. But it is not designed to take the full measure of the man. To do him justice, we need to look more deeply, avoid romanticizing him, and learn the lessons of his successes and failures.
I hope this glimpse of his compelling life will move many of the dynamic young movers and shakers of the anti-globalization, antiwar, people of color, feminist and queer movements to do just that.
Certainly, for the vast majority of people in Latin America and around the world, life has changed little except for the worse. We are more in need of revolutionary change than ever.
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