Motorcycle Diaries

Portrait of the revolutionary as a young man?

By Ben Chapman
From the December 2004 Print Edition

“Hatred as an element of struggle; unbending hatred for the enemy, which pushes a human being beyond his natural limitations, making him into an effective, violent, selective, and cold-blooded killing machine. This is what our soldiers must become …”

—Che Guevara

The Motorcycle Diaries, though hailed as a masterpiece by the likes of Robert Redford and the critics at the Sundance Film Festival, expounds an inherently flawed political message — just ask Elian Gonzalez’s mother and the thousands of Cuban refugees willing to risk their lives in order to break free from the “workers’ paradise” Che Guevara helped create. It begs the question: how can these Hollywood elites be so callous to the plight of the Cuban people and so blind to reality?

The movie centers on the life of pre-revolutionary Ernesto “Che” Guevara, his trek across Latin America, and his encounters with the impoverished peoples of Argentina, Chile, and Peru. His adventure culminates in his visit to a Peruvian leprosy colony run by Catholic nuns, who are portrayed as oppressors of the leprosy patients despite the fact that they provide the poor and disabled with free medical care. Despite his asthma, Guevara heroically swims across the Amazon River, which isolates the leprosy camp, in order to celebrate his birthday with the downtrodden patients and spread a message of hope and love.

But this rosy picture of Che Guevara contradicts the horrid realities. Guevara was a brutal man who enabled a brutal dictator, Fidel Castro, to rise to power. The man who seemed to spread hope to the people in The Motorcycle Diaries is the same man who organized Cuban labor camps, a man who preached not love and hope, as the movie suggests, but hate and destruction. He worked to enslave the very people he claimed to lift up.

Although initial conditions in Latin America were just as horrid as The Motorcycle Diaries depicts them, Guevara did little to improve the lives of average citizens. Just look at Cuba today. Are the Cuban people truly better off than they were under the regime of Batista? There was gross inequality before Guevara’s influence; after much bloodshed and senseless loss of life, there is still terrible inequality, even under a communist regime. As George Orwell once pointed out, everyone is equal, but some are more equal than others.

The film also points an accusing finger at the United States as a foreign oppressor responsible for the capture and death of Guevara in Bolivia in 1967. What the film neglects to tell audiences is that the Soviet Union was backing Guevara’s “peasant revolution” — a revolution that ironically failed to enlist a single Bolivian peasant and mainly attracted middle-class citizens and university students. In other words, the “revolution” was not about getting rid of foreign influence, nor did it truly promote the peasants’ interests. It was about Che Guevara and a group of rebels preying on the weak and taking advantage of a bad situation for their own gain and glory.

Guevara was successful at achieving one thing: building a persistent personality cult for himself. Even today, hippies and liberals wear T-shirts glorifying the image of Che Guevara. The mythic legend surrounding his character is ever-present in Cuba and among Marxist dissidents. Ultimately, Guevara aggrandized himself, and nothing more. He wanted to be a martyr, and he got his wish.

The film also mocks religion, in typical Marxist-Leninist fashion, calling the Catholic Church “Jesus Christ, Inc.” Religion, after all, is the opiate of the masses, despite the fact that millions worship the Almighty they believe gave us the gift of freedom and the ability to discern right from wrong. Guevara’s revolution, however, was not about freedom, nor did it concern itself with the concepts of right and wrong, and to advance his cause the film must belittle all alternative belief systems.

The film itself is a beautiful story about a young medical student bonding with his fellow countrymen, but it is a fictional story. Confronted with both humorous and sentimental moments, the audience cannot help but feel for the young revolutionary as he struggles to grasp with the political and societal troubles that plague his people. But Guevara did not liberate his people as he promised to do at the end of the film. To portray Che Guevara as a romantic, revolutionary “hero of the people” is intellectually dishonest. The silver screen hides what the filmmakers do not want you to see: in reality, he was a failed revolutionary at best.

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