Chasing Che

by Patrick Symmes

  The day of departure arrived. A nervous emotion invaded all of us. Surrounded by a noisy multitude of little boys attracted by the spectacle of the motorbike and our unusual dress, the departure began.

  That was a diary entry describing Guevara’s departure forty-four years before, but not the one written by Guevara himself. This was from the road diary of a man named Alberto Granado, the other half of that “us.” Guevara did not make his trip alone; his Notas de Viaje was filled with references to Granado, who had shared the motorcycle seat and all his adventures with him. But I had learned only a few months before that Granado too had kept a diary of the trip, describing the same events, the same places, and even the same conversations. Like Guevara’s diary, which had languished in obscurity with the Guevara family for decades, Granado’s diary had been forgotten for decades, and then finally published in Cuba in 1986, thirty-five years after their trip. I had a friend visiting Havana purchase a copy, which I now laid before me on the table beside my lunch. The edition was printed on flimsy paper with smudgy ink, under the grand title Testimony: With El Che Across South America. It had arrived just two days before my own departure, and this was literally the first chance I had had to crack the pages. This parallel account of the young Ernesto Guevara’s travel experiences would allow me to corroborate basic facts about the trip and flesh out the picture of how travel had changed Ernesto.

  Aside from a few qualities these two fellow-travelers shared—both men were from Córdoba and both were pursuing medicine—there was one overwhelming reason why Guevara wanted Alberto Granado along for the trip: Granado owned the motorcycle they were traveling on. The dilapidated 1939 Norton was mockingly named La Poderosa, or “the powerful one.” (Actually, the Norton was named La Poderosa II; the original La Poderosa had been Granado’s bicycle.)

  This fourteen-year-old English bike was to carry both men into what they understood would be the greatest undertaking of their young lives. The twenty-nine-year-old Granado’s friendship with the twenty-three-year-old Guevara was intense and would become the bookmark of the former’s life. Not only did Granado journey across South America with Guevara, but Granado was already in 1952 a devoted Marxist who would play a crucial role in crystallizing the revolutionary instinct of his younger companion. Years later, when Guevara was the famous Che and living in Havana, Granado would move there to be near his friend and lend his help in the building of socialism. Forged in the experience of travel, their friendship would endure until Guevara’s death in 1967.

  Granado’s account of the trip ran parallel to Guevara’s own notes, but I was only halfway through my milanesa sandwich and just one page into Granado’s account when I realized that the two volumes were different in some important ways. The divergence began with the fundamental question of why the two Argentines were undertaking the trip in the first place.

  Unlike Guevara, whose motorcycle “diaries” were, in fact, a polished memoir he had written after returning home, Granado’s account was raw, a live diary written each night, filled with immediacy, sometimes eloquent, often dogmatic, usually hasty, and always larded with the obscure practical details that seem of enormous importance at the time. If Guevara had never become famous as the Guerrillero Heroico of the 1960s, no one would have plucked these scribbled entries from a desk drawer and given them their grand title.

  In Cuba, the myth of the man they called the Guerrillero Heroico is an elaborate and official cult. Granado, a devoted supporter of the Cuban regime, was careful to do his part by heightening the noble motives behind Che’s motorcycle journey. In his introduction, Granado wrote that he and Guevara traveled with political goals:

  One had to know the world, but first Latin America, my suffering continent. And do so not with the eyes of a tourist, who looks only for landscapes, comfort, and ephemeral pleasures, but with the eyes and the spirit of a son of the people, who needs to know the beauty of the continent, the riches it contains, the men and women that inhabit it, as well as the internal and external enemies that exploit and impoverish it.

  Guevara’s account put the emphasis on something slightly less noble: he wanted to have some fun. “I was restless,” he wrote, calling himself “a dreamer and free spirit” interested in “faraway places, sailing tropical seas, traveling through Asia.”

  Asia proved beyond reach, but Guevara and Granado were tinkering on the motorcycle one October morning in 1951 when they realized that their means of travel was right in front of them. Instead of Asia, the two could make a journey across their own hemisphere as far as the roads would take them. Guevara claimed credit for the idea and said they planned to go as far as North America on La Poderosa. Granado also took credit for the plan, which he said was to go only to Venezuela. Perhaps it was inappropriate to admit that the Guerrillero Heroico had dreamed of making it big in the USA.

  Side by side on the table in front of me, the cheap, smudged pages of Granado’s Cuban account contrasted sharply with the glossy look of the British edition of Guevara’s diary. The differences in tone were just as wide. Granado’s language was enough to kill the soul—“bourgeois-democratic freedoms” and “the suffering proletariat” leaped off the page while “capitalist exploitation” lurked behind every tree in South America. Yet Guevara, who disclaimed all higher motives, wrote like a true searcher. Where Granado offered moral certitude, Guevara embraced his own limitations and biases:

  So, the coin was tossed, turned somersaults; sometimes coming up heads, sometimes tails. Man, the measure of all things, speaks through my mouth and recounts in my own words what my eyes saw. Out of ten possible heads I may have only seen one tail, or vice versa: there are no excuses; my mouth says what my eyes told it. Was our view too narrow, too biased, too hasty, were our conclusions too rigid? Maybe so …

  Whatever the twenty-three-year-old Ernesto was searching for—literary inspiration, adventure, or a solution to the world’s problems—he mounted the motorcycle with his eyes and mind open to the world he was about to enter. His at times brutal self-doubt was a sign of fundamental honesty, of an integrity uncontaminated by ideology or the habits of rigid thinking that political commitment required.

  Guevara’s spare Notas de Viaje had been dressed up considerably for its debut in English as The Motorcycle Diaries. The rather short narrative of the trip had been padded with letters that Guevara wrote home and long excerpts from his father’s memoirs. (“Years later, thinking back over his continuous traveling,” Ernesto Guevara Sr. wrote, “I realized that it had convinced him of his true destiny.”) The thrust of this English edition could be judged by its cover: The letters C, H, and E dwarfed everything else on the book jacket. That oversized type was something of a lie, for in fact the diaries had not been written by a famous revolutionary and Marxist superhero named Che. They were written by a young and unknown skeptic named simply Ernesto. One was a famous figure; the other was an unknown. Che was a political leader; Ernesto, I was beginning to believe, was a much more complex figure, a young man in search not of the world but of his own small place in it.

  But before they could discover the world, Granado and Guevara had to get moving. They stayed a few nights with Guevara’s relatives in Villa Gesell, stocked up on food, and then rolled onward. I decided to not even spend a night, but ride hard for the south and a more important conversation awaiting me there. I tucked both oddly mismatched diaries into my saddlebags again, paid, and passed out of town by the brown ocean.

  In his entry on Villa Gesell, Alberto Granado noted his astonishment at even this rather silty bit of water. The cause of his excitement was simple: raised in the mountains, this was the first time he had set eyes on the sea. Guevara also noted his friend’s discovery:

  For me, the sea has always been a confidant, a friend which absorbs all you tell it without betraying your secrets, and always gives the best advice—a sound you can interpret as you wish. For Alberto, it is a new, oddly perturbing spectacle, reflected in the intensity with which his gaze follows every wave s
welling then dying on the beach. At almost thirty, Alberto is seeing the Atlantic for the first time and is overwhelmed by a discovery which opens infinite routes to all points of the globe.

  Granado was less poetic. Writing in Villa Gesell on January 6, he said the ocean and other sites “give me a material base to tell myself how marvelous and important for our future formation this until-now hypothetical voyage is going to be.”

  Riding away at almost four in the afternoon, with just a few hours of sunlight to guide me to Miramar, the difference between these two views of the same ocean sat with me, ill digested. To Guevara, the sea was something mysterious and yet personal, a confidant, a friend with whom you shared secrets. To Granado, the same ocean was a “material base” for his “future formation.” The sea itself could be incorporated into this larger mission, a crusade whose outlines I was only beginning to see in the pages of his book, and one that would come to haunt me—and perhaps Guevara, too—as the three of us rode into the months ahead.

  For a few hours the main road to Patagonia ran southwest, following the coastline as it turned from the tropical embrace of the Rio de la Plata and bit into the pampas. From now on South America would grow narrow, pinched by the corset of two oceans eager to meet at Cape Horn. The farther south you went, the more this narrowing seemed to squeeze the blood from the land, numbing it into a pale, cold wilderness. By the end of the day I was riding almost straight into the lowering sun, racing down the empty road at eighty miles an hour, hoping to reach shelter before darkness arrived, at around 9 P.M. in the Southern Hemisphere’s January summer.

  Miramar was the great resort town where Guevara and Granado arrived on the sixth of January, 1952. It had taken them three days of travel to cover the distance I had done in eight hours, dog bite and lunch included. Modernized roads played a part, certainly, but the most important difference seemed to be in our motorcycles. Guevara and Granado were devoted to their old companion, La Poderosa, while I had bought my bike used—on a credit card—just two weeks before shipping it to Buenos Aires. I barely knew how to put gas into it and certainly hadn’t given it a name—the idea of naming my motorcycles had always seemed plain silly. They were machines, not horses or humans, and if the BMW was really an entity of fuel, electricity, and physics, then giving it anthropomorphic qualities would be a distraction from its true nature. Alberto Granado had no such overrational qualms: the Powerful One was the perfect name for a motorbike that wasn’t. The Norton was not particularly large to start with and definitely inadequate for two riders. Thirteen years old by the time they hit the road, La Poderosa was overloaded with an assortment of luggage, including a heavy canvas tent, waterproof saddlebags filled with personal goods, a pair of camp cots, a teakettle, food, a medical kit including Guevara’s asthma medicine, a pistol, and—they being Argentines—a barbecue grill. On this underpowered, overburdened, battle-scarred machine they planned to cross the hemisphere. Or at least hoped to. Guevara was so apprehensive about their chances of success that, “to save face, just in case,” he told friends that he was only going to Chile on the bike.

  My own odds looked better. The maps showed more roads, on straighter routes, in better condition, and everything about motorcycles and camping equipment had improved. Like La Poderosa, my BMW was more than a dozen years old, but I was traveling alone and therefore lightly. My engine was larger, and the technology of motors had improved immensely in the almost half-century interval since La Poderosa left its factory in England. My bike could handle the trip.

  The driver was another question. I didn’t plan to reach North America, but even if I followed their route on the motorbike only as far as Peru, and then turned toward Che’s grave site in Bolivia, that was still months and thousands of miles away across various borders, the steepest mountains and driest deserts in the world, through unknown hazards ranging from dogs to thieves to guerrillas. Listening to my pepper-grinder engine all afternoon, I half wished that I had lied and told my friends that I was only out for the short jaunt to Chile. I had been singing as I rode, an occupational hazard for motorcyclists locked inside their own helmets hour after hour, with an audience of one. Having run out of gas once today, I had somehow become fixated on an annoying Mexican folk song with its nonsensical lyrics about a cockroach that runs out of fuel and comes to a halt:

  La cucaracha, la cucaracha

  ya no puede caminar

  There were many versions of that song in English, all of them cleaner than the original. Back in Chihuahua, the original lyric had complained about a shortage of marihuana that stops the cockroach in its tracks. In my case it had been gasoline, so like many a gringo before me I cleaned up the lyric:

  La cucaracha, la cucaracha

  ya no puede caminar

  porque no tiene, porque le falta

  gasolina pa’ comprar

  Just at twilight I saw Miramar rise ahead of me. The blue ocean had shouldered aside the brown estuary by now and reclaimed the coast. Wild, foaming breakers cut into a line of cliffs that seemed held in place only by the roots of the tall white apartment blocks lining the sea. The two-lane road that ran along the coast into the city resembled a camel market. Vehicles of every sort tried to move in every direction at once, a Ford Falcon jammed with an extended sunburned family backing out of a beach-side parking spot into the path of a Mercedes that was in turn swerving around a boy carrying a surfboard toward a waiting dune buggy while clouds of impossibly young motorcyclists riding impossibly loud dirt bikes swept through every channel of pavement more than a foot wide, anyone at any moment liable to be skewered on the end of a twelve-foot-long fishing rod shouldered indiscriminately by a wandering grandfather who found walking the side of the road too painful on his bare feet and therefore used the middle. The entire high-season population of the town emptied onto the beach each day and spread up the coastline, then was inhaled back into Miramar’s trashy bars and steak restaurants at the approach of night.

  I crawled through the interwoven madness until I reached a traffic circle at the very edge of town, put down the kickstand, and dismounted. I needed to orient myself, find a place to stay, and rest my aching butt. Nose-deep in a guidebook, I didn’t notice the sound at first. Then it became too loud to ignore. I looked up and saw that a half dozen dirt bikes were independently circling the roundabout. Some had two passengers; all were tiny, whiny machines without the slightest redeeming value. The drivers—not one of them wore a helmet, and several were barefoot—patrolled round and round, occasionally gunning their engines in solar flares of testosterone. They were all looking at me.

  The first one stopped within seconds of my looking up. He was about sixteen and still had sand on his flip-flops. “What kind of moto is that?” He’d never seen a BMW motorcycle before. I told him it was German.

  “How fast does it go?”

  That was the same question the policeman had asked me this morning in Buenos Aires. This time, having driven eighty miles an hour at one point during the day, I had an answer to give him. He grunted and drove on.

  The second bike stopped a minute later. The driver and his passenger both looked about fifteen. The kid in back was wearing another one of those NO FEAR T-shirts. I’d believed that line once too.

  “How fast does it go?”

  I added ten to the figure I’d just named. They grunted.

  The third bike, the loudest yet, had a genuine grown-up for a driver. He gunned the engine every few seconds.

  “What kind of bike is that?” German, I told him. “How fast does it go?” I added ten to the figure I’d just named. No grunt this time, just a grave nod. We were a couple of motorcycle guys talking motorcycle stuff. He was polite enough to ask if I needed any help, and pointed me toward a campground before roaring off in a cloud of oil-laden blue smoke.

  Two more of my colleagues of the road caught me before I could leave the roundabout. Each time I added ten to the previous figure, until I was going a hundred and twenty miles an hour standing still. The l
ast boy finally whistled appreciatively.

  La Poderosa must have been a sight when it pulled into Miramar with its two passengers and tied-down exotica. In 1952, the city by the sea was an aristocratic reserve, a swank summering destination for the traditional elite of Argentina. Guevara was here to visit his girlfriend, María del Carmen Ferreyra, known as Chichina. She was a seventeen-year-old Córdoba girl from one of that city’s best families whom Ernesto had been courting for some time. According to My Son El Che (written by Ernesto Guevara Sr. after Che’s death), Chichina was “a charming young girl.… My family and I were all convinced he would marry her.”

  The Guevaras did not have much money, although they still had some of the trappings of aristocrats, like a home in Buenos Aires. Ernesto Sr. had lost much of the family fortune by poorly timed investments in the cultivation of yerba mate, the bitter green tea consumed ritualistically by Argentines. But the Guevaras still had one thing that mattered more than money—a good name. On the father’s side, they were distantly related to various muckety-mucks, including that noted Chilean Admiral Lynch. On the maternal side, the de la Sernas were notably upper class, the source of what little money the family still had. In the hierarchical social structure of those times, the family was therefore “impoverished aristocrats,” the noun being more important than the adjective. Ernesto Guevara was still of a suitable class to court Chichina.

  Alberto Granado was not. Granado was a short, husky fellow with few social graces, a long history of political radicalism, and enough talent to become a biochemist, a position similar to pharmacist that in Argentina comes with the medical title “Doctor.” Granado carried this humble background on his shoulder. A self-declared Marxist, he put his training in class analyses to work as soon as he met Chichina and her friends in Miramar.