Ernesto “Che” Guevara—the face emblazoned on T-shirts, murals and dorm-room posters around the world—is usually presented as the quintessential revolutionary: fearless, romantic, and eternally young. Yet behind the iconic photograph lurks a man whose life often seemed to be an extended exercise in getting things spectacularly wrong.
I’m embarrassed to admit that, until I reached Cuba, I knew next to nothing about Che. I had heard of The Motorcycle Diaries but had no idea he had written it. The face, of course, was familiar. I had been seeing it on T-shirts and graffiti since my teenage years in Europe; during the Pangea One World Expedition, it seemed to be plastered on every other wall in Latin America. Somehow, the man behind the face had never caught my interest.
Havana changed that. At the bookshop in the Hotel Nacional, I bought two of his books—The Motorcycle Diaries and The Latin American Diaries. At the book market in Plaza de Armas, I found a second-hand copy of his Bolivian Diary. In Trinidad, on Cuba’s southern Caribbean coast, I acquired a biography written by none other than Fidel Castro. It was quite a reading list for a man I had barely bothered to meet, even at a distance.
I warmed to Che almost immediately. There was something appealing about his youthfulness, his appetite for adventure and his restless urge to travel—not simply for pleasure, but to learn: to explore ancient civilisations, observe contemporary societies and study their politics. He seemed genuinely sensitive to the plight of the poor, drawn to the underdog and the oppressed, including the Indigenous people of Latin America, and possessed by a burning desire to improve their lot. One could admire the impulse, even while wondering about his methods.