Pan-American Stirrings

Good ol' Che

Ernesto "Che" Guevara was a dreamer.  An Argentine medical student turned revolutionary, he saw a better life for the once-great, now-downtrodden indigenous Latin American peoples.  In his politically-tinted autobiography, "The Motorcycle Diaries", Che offers a poignant firsthand account of the plight of his fellow Latin Americans.  Accompanied by a fellow medical student, Alberto Granado, Che traveled through the many countries of South America and was metamorphosed by the things he saw.  "The Motorcycle Diaries" is an account of that journey.

"The Motorcycle Diaries" is an impressively purposed book. Che wrote and published this autobiography to instil Pan-American communist sentiments in his fellow Mestizos.  Che believed the only way to achieve equality was to have a people's revolution; he explains this in "The Motorcycle Diaries".  He wrote this book to promote his ideals and to unite Latin America.  

This book was released during a time of turmoil in Latin America; political ideologies were being formed and implemented faster than the common man could keep up with, so Che published this book as a manifesto for the average Peruvian, Bolivian or Mexican.  Che wrote this using vernacular ("che" is Argentinian slang) language and Latin American idioms.  The fact that the original copy was written in Spanish makes it abundantly obvious that Che wrote this for downtrodden Spanish-speaking Latin Americans.  Che's style is an impressive one; he makes effective use of varied sentence structure and interesting vocabulary to keep the reader engaged, and he often mixes Spanish and English to create more accurate phrases or words.  Che's ability to subtly insert politics into his writings is a skill every political author should wish for.  Throughout the book, Che maintains an inflammatory if not revolutionary tone.  The point of this book was to make the plight of the common Latino abundantly clear, and to stir the reader to revolution. 

Over the last two weeks I read "The Motorcycle Diaries".  Overall, I enjoyed learning about 1950s Latin American culture and Che, but the book read more like a long description of scenery and social milieu than a story.  Therefore, I propose a new rating system: storypoints.

Storypoints are earned when a book effectively engages a reader through snappy dialog, interesting character development, nail-biting action scenes or various other storytelling devices.  A piece of writing that receives 0 storypoints is strictly informative or extremely boring.  Writing with 0 storypoints gets the Lorem Ipsum award (named after the famous boring and meaningless boilerplate text).  A literary creation that receives 10 storypoints earns the Maxwell's Worth Reading Award (shortened to Maxwell's).  A book that gets 20 storypoints is extremely riveting and earns the Harry Potter award.

Che's writings are, inherently, political, but he does not shove his agenda down the reader's throat.  Rather, he peppers his anecdotes with incisive political insights.  Che is ardently anti-establishment; he makes this clear through his bitter reprisals of Spanish conquistadors and the established ruling class.  Che uses carefully selected vocabulary to urge the reader to empathize with the "exploited" and "noble" native and hate the "idiotic" Spaniards that originally conquered Latin America, and the class that descended from them.

Che saw almost everything through a colonial lens.  He believed that all indigenous and mixed-race Latin American peoples were part of a larger "mestizo" class that had been beaten down and subjugated by foreign conquerors.  When describing the average Peruvian, Che regards them as a "once proud" race that was "defeated...by illiterate Spanish conquistadors".  Che makes his opinion of the Spaniards that first came to Latin America abundantly clear through his use of scathing adjectives like "idiotic", "banal", and "unfeeling" and by explicitly condemning them and all repressive authority figures.

"We constitute a single mestizo race, which from Mexico to the Magellan Straits bears notable ethnographic similarities.  And so, in an attempt to rid myself of the weight of small-minded provincialism, I propose a toast to Peru and to a United Latin America."

Alberto and Che in the movie adaptation

Che's anecdotes are interesting, sometimes dangerous and often comical.  Che described speeding through beautiful Latin American scenery with abundant clarity, earning him two storypoints, bringing him to a grand total of two so far.  He did describe a motorcycle crash (a few, actually), which would earn him storypoints except he glosses over the action and focuses more on "the beautiful gravel bend, by a little bubbling stream" that he fell on rather than the fall itself.  Because of the imagery there, I'll grudgingly give him another storypoint I suppose.  Che was an admirable elocutionist, and in his autobiography he offered many rousing speeches to the commoners, so he earns a storypoint there because said speeches are just so moving (see quote above).

Che and Alberto picked up various odd jobs to fund their passage through the South American continent.  During one of these jobs, Che worked for "a very strange person..whom [he] addressed with the utmost respect as Señora".  This "Señora" turned out to be a man.  Two storypoints for laughs.  Che also described how he and Alberto "executed a carefully calculated plan" to steal wine from their employers (another storypoint for attempted humor).

Che had a way of making the reader feel as though they are on his journey with him.  He described his intense hunger, cold and general discomfort in such a way as to make the reader empathize with his discomfort (a not entirely pleasant experience).  On a particularly unpleasant boat ride, he explained "the mosquitoes swarmed around us in clouds, worse than ever, as if taking their revenge on us for the fact that we would soon be out of their reach".  Because of this talent, I'll give him another three storypoints.