Salles’s Guevara: From Emotional Reaction to Thoughtful Action

In Walter Salles’s film The Motorcycle Diaries, viewers are witness to the transformation of Ernesto Guevara, later known as “Che.” Salles presents the journey of Alberto Granado and his friend, 23-year-old medical student Ernesto Guevara de la Serna, in a series of influential encounters that make Guevara aware of the harsh existences of many South Americans. Salles offers a compelling vision of how, little by little, a carefree motorcycle adventure binds Guevara to a life dedicated to achieving social justice at any cost. Three scenes in particular highlight Guevara’s metamorphosis from an emotional reaction, to intellectual understanding, to effective action: his encounter with Chilean miners, the class-conscience segregation of boat passengers, and the isolation of lepers at a remote treatment facility.

For Guevara, his first encounter with injustice occurs during conversations with Chilean miners. This interaction represents the beginning of his transformation. At the entrance to the mining camp, which could resemble a scene from day labor camps around the world, potential workers gather around a foreman for a U.S.-owned mining company. The foreman selects—seemingly at random—who will have the privilege to work that day. A man from the previous night gets picked for work, but his wife does not. Disappointed, she turns and walks away. Already angered by the process, Guevara becomes further enraged upon realizing that many workers were not being given water to drink. In response, he helplessly hurls a rock at the foreman’s truck as it drives away with the day’s workforce. Fernanda Bueno argues that, by showing Guevara’s weakness, Salles presents him from a neutral perspective. As she claims, “Considering film as poetic language that constructs significations, Salles uncovers Che Guevara’s path to revolution with powerful metaphors of images and sounds, which make of the young Ernesto Guevara a hero out of his weaknesses” (Bueno, 110). Guevara is not the immediate champion. He has no words, ideas, or actions to fight the injustice that unfolds before him. This also makes the experience one-sided, informing Guevara of the plight of so many, yet arousing only a petty physical response in return. Both Guevara and the film’s viewers long for him to achieve lasting impact, to foment meaningful change.

It is important that the injustice occurs at the hands of a U.S.-owned mining company. Throughout the 20th century, socialists were pitted opposite advocates of capitalism. James Petras claims that Guevara’s “revolutionary thought and practice combined a critical analysis of imperialism and capitalism with active involvement in and reflections on the construction of socialism. And he conceived of socialism as part of a new world order” (Petras 9). In Latin America, U.S. imperialism wrought a merciless capitalist system on the backs of a cheap local labor force. Thus, Salles’s choice of a foreign mining company ties Guevara’s outrage to the political systems that Guevara came to reject fully. Removing injustice, Guevara came to realize, also meant removing imperialist and capitalist influences. Socialist economic and political philosophies would fill the void.

Guevara’s observation of the treatment of lower-class boat passengers furthers his socialist awakening and cements his ideals. As he embarks on a ship steaming toward the San Pablo leper colony in Peru, Guevara notices that the steamboat is towing a smaller boat to ferry impoverished passengers. Salles shows Guevara silent but transfixed. If Guevara’s encounter with a callus mining foreman was visceral—complete with Guevara’s rock-throwing rage—this quiet portrait is far more nuanced. Because both film viewers and Salles’s protagonists have the memory of the first encounter, the second remains potent without the aid of dialogue. While the miners’ plight was an experience Guevara observed, the division of boat passengers is one in which Guevara himself is implicated. Guevara’s transformation begins to include an understanding that justice for others might require sacrifices on his part, too. This dovetails with Petras’s notion of teaching and leading by example. Petras contends that this concept repeats throughout Guevara’s socialist endeavors: “In his active role in the guerrilla struggle, he suffered the same hardships, took the same risks, and asked no special favors…” (Petras 17). In order to remove an overcrowded, unsafe boat from society, Guevara realizes he might need to board it himself, or at least forego the comforts of his own cabin. Just as Guevara’s understanding of suffering has transcended fleeting emotion, his willingness to affect change has transcended maintaining the comforts of his own existence. Guevara weighs the needs of others equally against his own, pushing him closer to the revolutionary leader he would eventually become.

Later, as Guevara serves suffering patients at the San Pablo leper colony, he again witnesses bias and discrimination. For three weeks, Guevara and Granado live on one side of a riverbank; lepers stay on the other. Salles employs the river as the starkest barrier yet between rich and poor, healthy and sick. Unable to remove the geographic division, Guevara and Granado challenge clinic rules by shaking patients’ hands without wearing gloves. When the head nun frowns on this behavior, the pair goes further, bonding with patients by playing soccer and playing drums with them. Bueno notes that this exemplifies the depth of Guevara’s transformation: “He is willing to sacrifice everything—including his safety—to connect with people and empower the poor and marginalized” (Bueno 111). When Guevara first encounters injustice at the mine, his response is emotional but ineffective. His experience with impoverished boat passengers has a deeper effect, wearing heavily on his intellect. Finally, as Bueno argues, Guevara’s transformation in San Pablo crosses a new threshold. Guevara transfers his beliefs into concrete action that successfully breaks down class barriers, albeit briefly. Guevara’s actions require the obvious risk to his own personal health. However, they reveal more: Guevara also is willing to accept criticism or rejection by others for his solidarity with the downtrodden. The fearlessness to risk one’s life shows one aspect of Guevara’s dedication. His fearlessness regarding others’ opinions of his actions shows another. These two components effectively trace how Guevara could throw himself into guerrilla conflict and away from those that he loved, and those that loved him.

At the end of the film, as Granado and Guevara prepare to leave the leper colony, Guevara makes a birthday toast. Fittingly, the toast is also his first political speech, evidence of how Guevara would later lead with both words and actions. As Petras claims, “Che grappled with policies for reducing hierarchy and eliminating bureaucracy and privileged distinctions between leaders and followers. He advocated engaging in the everyday work and life of the people while exercising authority in positions of leadership” (Petras 15). Guevara wanted to see leaders and followers work as a unified front. He did not approve of the schism between the wealthy and the poor. Yet he accepted his role as leader of this movement. Had Guevara not seen such injustices on his journey, perhaps he might not have been filled with the passionate dedication necessary for change. The poignant scenarios he witnesses, such as the injustices at the leper colony, contribute to his desire to be more than an angry young man or a leftist intellectual. He commits himself to become an active agent for change on every level. The bias and discrimination he sees fuel him with quiet rage, motivating him to fight for equality across social boundaries.

Salles conveys this dramatic transformation of the medical student Ernesto to the revolutionary leader “Che.” The stories of Guevara’s South American journey, both mythological and real, defined his leadership and continue to fuel his legacy. Referencing Guevara’s legacy, Bueno notes: “The myth of Che Guevara is connected worldwide to the memory of the triumph of the Cuban Revolution and the African wars of Independence” (Bueno 107). Che Guevara embodies the ideal rebel and visionary, exceeding the bounds of his actions, spanning cultures, and even eras. Many of today’s socialist movements cast themselves in Guevara’s image of a revolutionary leader. Throughout Salles’s film, we see Guevara at the grassroots level, working to become the model of effective socialism, an example of conscientious labor.

At one point in Salles’s film, Ernesto wonders if it is possible to be nostalgic for a world one never knew. His idealized notions carry him into his role as ardent revolutionary, ceaselessly working to achieve his vision. Salles’s film takes place in an era before the Cuban revolution and before the military coups of the 1960s. The Motorcycle Diaries depicts Guevara's youthful idealism and records the injustices that gift him a greater understanding of and empathy for cultural differences. This transformation clears the path for his future projects as revolutionary leader. The compassion and humility that stoked his violent outrage are what make Che such a controversial leader, both loved in despised in past and present. Some lament that Guevara has become a commercial icon. The Motorcycle Diaries, a commercially successfully film about a Marxist, speaks to that tension. Yet the content of Salles’s work—and the irony of its commercial success—demonstrates that Guevara’s transformation and the life that followed it still stand as a voice for the voiceless and further enshrine the memory of a timeless revolutionary.

Works Cited

Bueno, Fernanda. “Motorcycle Diaries: the myth of Che Guevara in the twenty-first century.” Confluencia Fall 2007 (2007): 107-114.

The Motorcycle Diaries. Dir. Walter Salles. Perf. Gael Garcia Bernal. Focus Features, 2004. Blu-Ray.

Petras, James. “Che Guevara and Contemporary Revolutionary Movements.” Latin American Perspectives 25.4 (2007): 9-17.