![]() “All this wandering around ‘Our America with a Capital A’ has changed me more than I thought.” ![]() “I am not the person I once was,” he wrote upon his return. The 8,000-mile trip from the Andes to the Amazon made an impact on the young medical student by exposing him to social injustice, economic inequality, capitalist exploitation and political repression. Guevara Joins Fidel Castro in Cuban Revolution Granado began work at a local leprosy clinic while his friend flew to Miami and spent three weeks in the United States before returning home to Argentina after eight months away. “And so, in an attempt to rid myself of the weight of small-minded provincialism, I propose a toast to Peru and to a United Latin America.”Ĭontinuing their travels, the pair voyaged down the Amazon on a wooden raft, christened Mambo-Tango, until they surrendered to the swift currents and swarms of mosquitoes and took refuge in Leticia, Colombia, for nine days where they trained a local soccer team, with the future guerilla leader playing goalie.įollowing a flight to Bogota on what Guevara called “a cocktail-shaker of an airplane,” they traveled by bus and truck to Caracas, Venezuela, where the pair separated. “The division of America into unstable and illusionary nations is completely fictional, we constitute a single mestizo race, which from Mexico to the Magellan straits bears notable ethnographical similarities,” he said at a birthday party thrown in his honor at the leper colony. The medical student’s travels made him more conscious of a common South American civilization and awoke in him a pan-American vision. “The psychological lift it gives to these poor people-treating them as normal human beings instead of animals, as they are used to-is incalculable,” Guevara wrote. Some give the impression they go on living only because it’s a habit they cannot shake.”Īfter sailing on the Amazon River, Granado and Guevara spent two weeks at a leper colony in eastern Peru where the humane treatment of the 600 patients affirmed Granado’s desire to continue his work helping those with leprosy. “Their stares are tame, almost fearful, and completely indifferent to the outside world. “These people who watch us walk through the streets of the town are a defeated race,” Guevara wrote. In Peru, the two Argentines saw the wretched poverty endured by indigenous people treated as second-class citizens. “The biggest effort Chile should make is to shake its uncomfortable Yankee friend from its back, a task that for the moment at least is Herculean.” - Che Guevara “The biggest effort Chile should make is to shake its uncomfortable Yankee friend from its back, a task that for the moment at least is Herculean.” “The only thing that matters is the enthusiasm with which the workers set to ruining their health in search of a few meager crumbs that barely provide their subsistence,” he wrote. There, Guevara witnessed the exploitation of the mine workers. The friends visited iconic locations such as Lake Titicaca and the ruins of Machu Picchu, which Guevara called “the pure expression of the most powerful indigenous race in the Americas.” They also visited decidedly less touristy locations like the great copper mine in the Chilean town of Chuquicamata that was operated by an American multinational company. Plagued by his chronic asthma, Guevara had a rough start to the trip as he contracted the flu and nursed a broken heart after receiving a break-up letter from his girlfriend.Īlberto Granado on the set of "The Motorcycle Diaries," a 2004 film based on his ride with friend, Che Guevara. “His interest in medicine as a career and profession was in part an expression of his social consciousness, which developed at an early age.”Īfter leaving Cordoba, the two friends visited the Argentine capital of Buenos Aires and the seaside city of Miramar before crossing the barren pampas and ascending into the Andes. “Che grew up in an upper middle-class family that had hit on hard times, but it was an intellectual environment that was clearly attentive to political processes,” he says. Guevara’s social awareness had already begun to emerge during his prior travels in Argentina and abroad, says Paulo Drinot, a professor of Latin American history at University College London and editor of Che’s Travels: The Making of a Revolutionary in 1950s Latin America.
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