The Motorcycle Diaries

I just finished watching The Motorcycle Diaries and am now sitting in my room with a furrowed brow. The movie is based on diaries written by Ernesto "Che" Guevara as he took his first journey through South America. I'm sure most of you are familiar with Guevara, who was a key figure in the Cuban revolution. I've also recently seen pictures of him splashed across T-shirts, backpacks, and all sorts of things, and been slightly disgusted because I knew what he helped bring about -- a dictatorship. However, this movie shows a different perspective of Guevara. Looking at the man presented here, it's not hard to see why teenagers wear his face. He is a bright, joyful, thoughtful, youthful and impassioned medical student taking some time to see, as it says in the movie, "a land he has only known in books." With his friend Alberto Granado, he travels from Argentina to Venezuela on an old motorcycle nicknamed "the Mighty One" who "pees oil." They start out so naive, utterly unaware of what they'll encounter; they suffer their trials early, and are exposed to so much on the trip. You can see both of them, but especially Guevara, losing their ability to be carefree as they see what the poor people of South America are put through. The strange thing, though, is that you see no sign of militancy in Guevara, with the exception of one line. When Guevara and Granado are in Macchu Picchu, Granado tells Guevara of a "plan" to marry an Inca descendant, encourage the other Inca descendants and indigenous people to vote, and start a revolution that way. Guevara's reply: "A revolution without guns, Mial? It would never work." It sounds chilling typed like that, but it's not in the movie, I promise. Guevara is portrayed as a man who wants to shed labels and help people, no matter what class they may belong to. This portrayal raises all sorts of thoughts and questions for me. Is it okay to show just this one side of a man who later became a militant? Won't it make people idealize him a bit? What happened to make Guevara, shown as so loving and passionate about helping people, become what he did? What would he think about what Castro is doing in Cuba now? I don't know much about Guevara or the Cuban revolution (other than it started to overthrow a dictatorship), and so these are all questions that must brew in my mind for a long time. However, I took more than questions away from this movie. I was reminded of the dangers of judging others. After all, I had this pretty nasty picture of Guevara in my head before I saw this, and now I've been exposed to a positive portrayal as well. It made me question the status quo, which is always a good thing. The depictions in this film were moving, though sometimes they seemed a bit melodramatic. I still saw, though, why Guevara wanted the political system in South and Latin America to change. The system he helped create failed to help people, but in some ways, ours has too. Middle- and upper-class people here are probably better off than those in Cuba, but are the poor? I doubt it. And, you know, that's really sad. What's even sadder is that I honestly don't think that can change. We've seen communism and socialism don't erradicate it, nor does capitalism or any other political system I can think of. I suppose the best we can do is keep trying, but how do we ensure that we don't make things worse?