Thirty-seven years after his execution in the Bolivian jungle, Che Guevara lives on, immortalised on more T-shirts than ever. But the image is weirdly depoliticised and dehistoricised. Now Che is pure image, pure icon. Even Jimi Hendrix has more content.
The Motorcycle Diaries, Walter Salles’s fervent, dreamily reverent tale of Ernesto ”Che” Guevara’s legendary gap year, won’t do much to change this. Here is the epic tour of Latin America he took, as a short-haired 23-year-old medical student, with his friend Alberto Granado, a cheery postgrad in biochemistry — both seated astride Granado’s spluttering bike. It is based partly on Che’s own memoir (originally and unsexily called Travel Notes) and Granado’s book Travels With Che Guevara.
Their ambitious route took them from Guevara’s elegant, upper-middle-class family home in Argentina, through the Andes, into Chile, then to the Peruvian Amazon and Machu Picchu. They planned to arrive in Venezuela in time for Alberto’s 30th birthday. And all this in 1952: no backpackers, no tourists, nothing but the open road, with some lovely landscapes exquisitely photographed by Eric Gautier. It has the same kind of sumptuously beautiful look Salles conjured for his Brazilian revenge drama Behind the Sun.
Here is Che’s pre-revolutionary existence, in its pristine state of idealism, passion and sheer vibrant youth. Guevara is played by the handsome, charismatic Gael GarcÃÂa Bernal (who has played Che before, in a 2002 TV mini-series about Fidel Castro). He is utterly convincing as an energetic, fiercely idealistic, but formidably serious and focused young man. Rodrigo de la Serna plays the genial Granado, who provides light relief on the journey. (I had always thought, incidentally, that the nickname Che, Argentinean slang for ”mate” or ”buddy”, came into being on this trip, the two men calling each other ”Che” Granado and ”Che” Guevara. But Alberto here calls Ernesto by a nickname that has vanished from history, ”Fuser”.)
On their journey, Granado and Guevara cheekily pass themselves off as doctors working on a cure for leprosy to obtain free lodgings and motorcycle maintenance. Both have an eye for the ladies. But they also come into contact with a species they had never before properly encountered: poor people. They meet tenant farmers who have been high-handedly evicted and forced into working in unspeakably grim and dangerous mines.
There are chunks of dialogue so bleak they can only have come from real life. ”That cow is going blind,” says Che, as he rides in the back of a truck with a poor, suffering beast. ”So?” shrugs its peasant minder. ”All it will see is shit.” Salles has evidently found non-professionals to play many of the agrarian proletariat, and has been able to use them in locations that have not changed appreciably in 50 years.
If, to some, there is a sentimentalisation of poverty here, there is also a sentimentalisation of Che himself. We see our young hero struggling with asthma, treated with hypodermics of adrenaline. These are said to have given Che his ferocious rages: an unlovely side of his personality, and surely a part of his revolutionary temperament, but absent from this film.
Che was to become an admirer of Stalin, for a time at least, and a brilliant, ruthless military leader — a great believer in the firing squad. He was also, arguably, the co-author of Cuba’s ruinous dependence on the Soviet Union. But then came that martyrdom in the jungle, which cancelled the dark side of Che. He has not grown old like Fidel, and so the motorcycle diaries, the bold and thrilling testament of youth, are a potent part of Che’s myth. Salles does them justice. — Â