The Motorcycle Diaries Study Guide

Born into a middle class Argentine family, Ernesto “Che” Guevara became one of the most important revolutionary figures of the twentieth century. As a young student, he traveled around South America (a trip this book details), observing the rampant poverty and class oppression suffered by most of its people. Subsequently, Ernesto traveled to Guatemala and became involved in social reform there, only to see his efforts thwarted by a United States-supported coup that replaced a liberal president with a much more conservative one. Because of these experiences, Guevara became a radical Communist and devoted his life to fighting capitalism and imperialism. In the 1950s, he participated in the Cuban Revolution that installed Fidel Castro in power.  Later, he attempted similar revolutions in the Congo and Bolivia. In 1967, CIA-assisted Bolivian armed forces captured Guevara and killed him.

Guevara came of age in the period immediately following World War II. Two superpowers emerged from this war: the United States, a capitalist democracy, and the Soviet Union, a Communist country. Diametrically opposed to each other ideologically, the two powers remained for decades in a state of political tension we now call the Cold War. They competed by compiling formidable nuclear arsenals and attempting to foster their rival ideologies abroad by whatever means possible. For the US, this meant using the army and covert forces to install and support pro-capitalist leaders sympathetic to American business interests in Latin American countries, even if they were dictators or if the people supported a more liberal government. Guevara observed and came to loathe this policy of intervention; he eventually participated in the Cold War by promoting revolutionary Communism throughout Latin America. Guevara’s most significant political action was his involvement in the Cuban Revolution, which successfully defeated a capitalist regime and established a lasting Communist one.  Fidel Castro, with whom Guevara organized the revolution, remained in power (becoming a dictator himself) for several decades, and Cuba remains a Communist nation today. Guevara was part of the Cuban government during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, during which the Russian government constructed nuclear missiles in Cuba in response to a failed US invasion. This event is generally known as the highest point of Cold War nuclear tension.

Guevara was highly influenced by The Communist Manifesto and Das Kapital, two nineteenth-century texts in which the political philosopher Karl Marx articulated the necessity to fight against capitalism and class-based societies, replacing them with political structures based on the equal sharing of wages. Later in his career, Che wrote a number of influential books on his political philosophy and personal experiences. Among the most famous are Guerilla Warfare: a Manual, which he distributed to revolutionary movements all over Latin America, and The Bolivian Diary, a personal record of his last campaign. He was killed less than 24 hours after his last entry. The Motorcycle Diaries has much in common with other travel narratives. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, by Robert Pirsig, is another philosophically-driven chronicle of a road trip by motorcycle, and Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, another road trip narrative, also asserts the importance of long periods of travel and solitude in forming the personal character of an unconventional protagonist. Additionally, as one of the most famous political memoirs ever published, The Motorcycle Diaries has done much to define and influence this genre as a whole. Guevara ties his politics to concrete personal experiences during this youth, and many subsequent authors have also used this tactic for explaining the origins of a political consciousness; for example, in Dreams of My Father, Barack Obama writes about how his youth and young adult life shaped his ideology as a politician.