Where to Start with Che Guevara: A Reading Guide
Where to start with Che Guevara — how to approach The Motorcycle Diaries, his posthumously published journal of the 1952 journey through South America that transformed a young medical student into the figure history would make of him. A complete reading guide.
By Natalie Osei
Ernesto Guevara de la Serna (1928–1967), known as Che Guevara, was an Argentine Marxist revolutionary, physician, and guerrilla leader whose face — reproduced on a million T-shirts — has become one of the most recognisable images of the twentieth century. Before he was any of those things he was a twenty-three-year-old medical student with a motorcycle, a friend, and a plan to travel the length of South America. The Motorcycle Diaries, assembled from the journals of that 1952 journey and published posthumously in 1995, is the document of who he was before he became who he became — and it is considerably more interesting for that.
Where to Start: The Motorcycle Diaries (1995)
The essential Che Guevara — and one of the most unusual memoirs in the travel writing canon: a posthumous document that functions simultaneously as coming-of-age narrative, political origin story, and picaresque comedy. The Motorcycle Diaries opens with a young man who is primarily concerned with adventure. The motorcycle is called La Poderosa — The Mighty One — and the tone of the early chapters is accordingly confident: two charming, educated young men from Buenos Aires setting out to see a continent that they believe will more or less co-operate with their plans.
The comedy of the journey is more sustained than the mythology of Guevara allows for. He and Granado scheme their way into food and accommodation with a combination of genuine medical credentials and creative embellishment; they fall off the motorcycle at regular intervals; La Poderosa gives out entirely in Chile and they continue by hitchhiking, boat, and whatever comes next. Guevara’s self-deprecation in these passages — the gap between how he imagined the journey and how it is actually proceeding — is warm and self-aware in a way that survives the decades between composition and publication.
The Chile chapters are where the register begins to shift. Guevara and Granado pass through the copper mining regions of northern Chile where the mines were owned by American corporations and the miners lived in conditions of systematic poverty. Guevara describes what he sees without editorialising; the description does the work. A night spent with a dispossessed couple — communist miners who had lost everything — gives him a specific face for the abstraction of inequality that he had previously understood only in general terms.
The San Pablo leprosarium is the book’s moral climax. Guevara spent his twenty-fourth birthday at a leprosarium in Peru where staff and patients were kept strictly separated by a small river. He and Granado crossed to the patients’ side to celebrate — an act that violated the facility’s protocols but expressed something about what Guevara thought medicine was for. He does not theorise the gesture. He simply describes what happened: the patients, the celebration, the swim back across the Amazon in the dark. The reader draws the inference about what kind of doctor — and what kind of man — is being formed.
The transformation is incomplete when the book ends. The diaries close before the revolution, before the guerrilla campaigns, before everything that would make the mythology. What they capture is the formation of a conscience, and it is the most illuminating document about that process available.
Why The Motorcycle Diaries Is the Ideal First Book
For a reader new to the writings of Ernesto Che Guevara, The Motorcycle Diaries is the ideal first book because it is his most famous and accessible work and the fullest expression of his early, formative experience, the youthful journey across South America that shaped his outlook. The Motorcycle Diaries recounts the road trip Guevara took as a young medical student across Latin America, recording the people, poverty, and landscapes he encountered before he became a revolutionary figure. As an entry point it is ideal, for it is his best-known book and a vivid, accessible account of the journey that influenced him, readable as travel memoir and as the record of a young man’s awakening. It welcomes the newcomer with its travel narrative, its vivid observation, and its personal voice, drawing the reader into the experiences that shaped a controversial historical figure, whom readers may approach with their own critical perspective. It is his most famous work, so the new reader encounters Guevara’s writing at its most accessible. For the newcomer, then, The Motorcycle Diaries is the natural starting point.
What to Expect as a New Reader
As a new reader, you can expect The Motorcycle Diaries to be a vivid, personal, and formative travel memoir. You can expect a road-trip narrative, for the book recounts the journey Guevara took as a young medical student across South America. You can expect vivid observation, for he records the people, landscapes, poverty, and injustices he encountered. You can expect a personal voice, for the book is the diary of a young man, full of adventure, humor, and growing awareness. You can expect a record of awakening, for the journey is often seen as formative in shaping his later political outlook. You can expect a portrait of mid-twentieth-century Latin America as seen by a young traveler. You can expect material connected to a controversial historical figure, which readers may approach with their own critical and historical perspective. Expect, in short, a vivid, personal, and formative travel memoir, an accessible introduction to Guevara’s early writing.
Going Deeper After Your First Book
Once The Motorcycle Diaries has introduced you to Guevara’s early writing, the reader who wishes to go deeper can explore his other writings and the wider historical literature about him and his era, approaching a controversial figure with a critical and historical perspective. His other books and diaries record his later experiences and his political and military thinking, while the broad body of history and biography about Guevara, the Cuban Revolution, and twentieth-century Latin America offers many perspectives, including critical ones, that the thoughtful reader weighs together. Reading more widely, and critically, deepens your understanding of the historical figure, his context, and the debates surrounding him. The reader is well served by engaging a range of historical sources and viewpoints rather than any single account. Building your reading journey from The Motorcycle Diaries is a matter of carrying it into Guevara’s other writings and, importantly, into the wider critical and historical literature. The reader who begins here will have encountered the formative early writing of a major and controversial historical figure.
Reading Che Guevara
The Motorcycle Diaries is Guevara’s essential text in book form. Readers who want the continuation should look to biographical accounts — Jon Lee Anderson’s Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life is the definitive treatment — rather than Guevara’s own subsequent writing, which becomes more explicitly political and less personally revealing.
For the full Che Guevara bibliography, reviews, and biography, visit the Che Guevara author page on Editors Reads.
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Frequently Asked Questions
Where should I start with Che Guevara?
The Motorcycle Diaries: Notes on a Latin American Journey (1995, based on diaries from 1952) is the essential text — the journal Guevara kept during a nine-month motorcycle trip through South America he took at twenty-three as a final-year medical student. He and his friend Alberto Granado left Buenos Aires on a 500cc Norton motorcycle, rode through Argentina, Chile, Peru, Colombia, and Venezuela, and encountered a continent of extreme inequality that middle-class Buenos Aires had never shown him. The book was assembled posthumously from his notes and published in 1995 — nearly three decades after his death — and is remarkable for its freshness: Guevara is funny, irreverent, and visibly pre-political, which makes the transformation visible in real time.
What is The Motorcycle Diaries about?
The book is about travel as political education — what you see when you have no money to retreat from the places you are passing through. Guevara and Granado charmed their way across a continent, sleeping in police stations, working at leprosaria, surviving on improvisation. The comedy of the early sections — the motorcycle breaking down repeatedly, the schemes to get fed, the encounters with women in every town — gradually gives way to something heavier as the journey takes them into the mining communities of Chile, the indigenous poverty of Peru, and the patients' side of a Peruvian leprosarium. The moral turning point is Guevara swimming across the Amazon to celebrate his birthday with the quarantined patients at San Pablo — an act described without editorial comment that marks the boundary between the journey he began and the figure he would become.
Is The Motorcycle Diaries a political book?
Less than many readers expect. The diaries were written before Guevara became Che — before the Cuban revolution, before the guerrilla campaigns, before the mythology. The political consciousness visible in the book is emergent rather than formed: he sees poverty and inequality clearly, he responds to it with evident moral feeling, but he does not yet have the political framework that would later organise those responses. Readers looking for the revolutionary manifesto will not find it here. What they will find is the formation of a conscience — the experience of seeing a continent through the eyes of its poorest residents — and that is both more interesting and more historically instructive.
What should I read after The Motorcycle Diaries?
After The Motorcycle Diaries, Jon Lee Anderson's Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life provides the definitive biographical account of what the journey set in motion — how the young man of the diaries became the figure of history. For other travel writing that functions as political education, George Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London covers comparable territory in a different continent: what you see when you are poor enough to be invisible. Rolf Potts's Vagabonding and Jack Kerouac's On the Road share the road trip structure but with very different political trajectories.
