Product Description

In 1952, 24-year-old Ernesto Guevara left his native Argentina to motorcycle the back roads of South America. Eight months later, Ernesto returned, transformed into 'Che' the revolutionary. His account of that journey, "Motorcycle Diaries", has become a classic. Nearly half a century later, Patrick Symmes set off on his BMW R80/GS along the same route in search of the people and places encountered by Che. Symmes' own adventures - he runs out of petrol in an Argentine desert, breaks down in the Andes, and drinks himself blind in Cuba with Che's travel partner, Alberto Granado - counterpoint those of the great revolutionary. The book gives an insight into the moulding of the great Latin American hero and paints a portrait of a continent whose dreams of utopia give birth not only to freedom fighters but also tyrants. But above all it is the story of a great journey on the open road, where man and machine traverse the unknown in search of the spirit's keenest desires.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #525757 in Books
• Published on: 2001-03-29
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 320 pages

From Amazon.com
A motorcycle trip in 1952 marked a turning point for Ernesto Guevara Lynch de la Serna, a medical student returning from a journey into poverty and oppression with a vision of guerilla-style change and a new name, Che Guevara. Going on to help overthrow the Cuban government, align himself with Castro, and become elevated to martyred hero status when he was executed in Bolivia in 1967, Guevara's likeness is now commercialized and captured on T-shirts, castanets, and watches.

New York writer Patrick Symmes embarks on motorcycle tracing Guevara's route through Argentina, Bolivia, Peru, Chile, and Cuba, seeking insight into what Guevara experienced and what his political movement wrought. Meeting with those who knew the young Che--among them a lover, a leper, and his motorcycle traveling cohort--proves interesting enough, though rarely insightful since some were children at the time, some are confused, and others refuse to talk openly. More revealing are Symmes's travels on his bike, nicknamed La Cucaracha. He winds through both Buenos Aires' high society and Peruvian poverty, finding a fragmented country where revolutions have brought mountain peasants fleeing to shanty towns, and where blind idealism coexists with blatant denouncement of the violent tactics used by Cuban Communists, even by Che's most respected soldiers. Beautifully written, the stories that unfold here reflect the complex contradiction that endures in Latin America three long decades after Ernesto "Che" Guevara's death. --Melissa Rossi

From Publishers Weekly
In 1952, a 17-year-old, prerevolutionary Che Guevara lit out with a friend on a motorcycle trip through Latin America. It was, as he wrote in his Motorcycle Diaries, a journey that would shape his attitudes toward politics, people and revolutions. Symmes, a freelance travel writer, traversed the same route in 1996, with entertaining and illuminating results. Fluidly moving between the past and the present, he tosses out observations about Che's expedition while chronicling his own adventures. In Argentina, Symmes encounters a defensive German who insists he is not a Nazi; in Chile he visits a utopian settlement founded by a wealthy and radical environmentalist; in Peru he visits a leper colony, the same one Che visited in 1952. Refreshingly, Symmes avoids digressions of self-discovery, instead letting his book serve as a primer for recent Latin American history and his own take on the region. Symmes's prose, like the Latin America he writes about, is spotted with gems. He says pointedly, "The funny thing about a dictatorship: it was great for culture. If there was one sure way Pinochet could support poetry, it was by staging a military coup." Unsentimental and funny, this book combines the spiritedness of a gonzo journalist with a serious reporter's sense of purpose. First serial rights to Talk magazine. (Feb.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
The last two years have seen a resurgence of interest in Ernesto (Che) Guevara, the Argentine-born Cuban revolutionary. Several biographies and numerous books have added significantly to our knowledge about this important 20th-century figure. Now Symmes, a journalist, contributes an account of his attempt to re-create Che's 1952 eight-month motorcycle journey across Argentina, Chile, Bolivia and Peru--a trip that has been called the seminal, radicalizing event of Guevara's life, the inspiration for his politics and life work as a revolutionary fighter. Although Symmes set out on the trip eager to discover the early Che, the one who wasn't involved in revolutionary activities, he ends up writing much more about himself than about Che and more about current issues in Latin America than about the 1950s. Of interest to libraries with travel collections.
-Mark L. Grover, Brigham Young Univ. Lib., Provo, UT
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Customer Reviews

Not just for Che addicts
I picked up this book after spending some time in Peru, not knowing much about Che except his iconic image on t-shirts of disconnected youths. I think I read the book from cover to cover without putting it down, almost literally. This book is one of the most exciting stories I've read in a long time, and perhaps one of the best narrative histories I've read. What made it such a great read was that it wasn't about the revolution, the image, or the icon that has since been created. It was about a couple of lost youth travelling around trying to find themselves. Knowing this made me appreciate Che even more, and to explore more about this dynamic individual who has become such an integral part of a globalised culture.

Fabulous!
This a great read. Engagingly written and entertaining. Che fans and motorcycling fans alike will also love "Mi Moto Fidel: Motorcycling Through Castro's Cuba," a fascinating and sometimes hilarious, sometimes hair-raising story of a 7,000-mile journey and justifiably the winner of both the 2002 "Travel Book of the Year" and the North American Travel Journalist Association's Awards of Excellence "Grand Prize."

With Symmes chasing Che and finding?
I do not know what I expected when I bought this book, but reading g it proved well worth my time and money. It is a travel book more in the spirit of Stienbeck's Travels With Charlie than it is with In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin. It is a ramble, through southern South America, along the journey made by Che before he was "Che" and through the mind of Patrick Symmes. All three are interesting places to go.

I guess my one surprise was the amount of trouble that he had with his BMW motorcycle. A friend of mine had one several years ago, the same model if not the same year, and it was almost indestructible. It had to be with my friend as the owner. So that was a disappointment.

The insights into the historical person Che became later are there, sort of sprinkled through the book as is a good look at the youth. He is not an adulator and he neither hides nor dwells on the dark side of being a committed revolutionary. Of course, Che was not yet committed at least when he started this journey. A warrior doctor along with the idea of a warrior priest has always seemed to be an oxymoron to me. The creation of exactly that which you have trained, at great cost, to fight must require conviction of a special kind. That Che was committed there can be no doubt - but why to this life course remains elusive for me. He was sensitive man, and a killer. A doctor and a soldier. A revolutionary and a mystic. Like Thomas Jefferson's utterly inexplicable slave holdings, these realities are also the reasons he still fascinates me.

I like the book. I think I would like the author and I recommend it as an interesting look at a difficult man and a romantic journey that I and perhaps you would have liked to have joined, and may still enjoy in spirit.