Ernesto

Che Guevara is the main character of the Motorcycle Diaries. These diaries are Che's diary entries during his 1951-1952 trip with his friend Alberto Granado across Latin America, from Cordoba, Buenos Aires to Caracus, where Che leaves for Miami to finish medical school. In 1953, Che will become a radicalized communist and will in 1956-58 become a leader of the communist revolution in Cuba. Between this event and 1966, when Che was killed, he became a legendary freedom-fighter on the global left. The Motorcycle Diaries helped to add to his mystique.

The "Che" of the Motorcycle Diaries is not the Che of the Cuban Revolution, as Che notes early on in the book. This was a pre-revolutionary Che, a boy of twenty-three and twenty-four, looking for adventure and beauty on the road in Latin America. In the book, Che is a risk-taker, and a bit of a hooligan graduate student...