Motociletta: the roadtrip of a student in direction to the revolution

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- The choc of discovering the poverty level in Latin America

With the disappearance of la Pederosa, their motorcycle, the two travelers started to experiment the contact with the real person. Indeed, they met not only their friends or people they knew but also truck driver, worker and people in a certain level of poverty. It is in Valparaíso that their journey really took the direction waited at the beginning of their trip. But it is also there they will do their first encountering with poverty. Ernesto write down in his diary that they are looking for the poorest neighborhood to talk with the hobos, with those who has nothing in their life except life itself. He said that he was able to breath the misery present all around them. He describes this experiment as heartbreaking but also as the one they were looking for since the beginning. However, the first choc he will receive from the level of poverty present in Latin America was the 7th of march 1952. He met an old woman with asthma who was really sick and living in a precarious place. The description he made about her relate of his sadness to see a human being in a such state of misery and show how this situation scandalize him. Indeed, in “The Motorcycle Diaries”, Ernesto Guevara, when he is talking about the old woman, said: “The poor thing was in a pitiful state, breathing the acrid smell of concentrated sweat and dirty feet that filled her room, mixed with the dust from a couple of armchairs, the only luxury items in her house. On top of her asthma, she had a heart condition. It is at times like this, when a doctor is conscious of his complete powerlessness, that he longs for change: a change to prevent the injustice (…). It is there, in the final moments, for people whose farthest horizon has always been tomorrow, that one comprehends the profound tragedy circumscribing the life of the proletariat the world over. In those dying eyes there is a submissive appeal for forgiveness and also, often, a desperate plea for consolation which is lost to the void, just as their body will soon be lost in the magnitude of the mystery surrounding us. How long this present order, based on an absurd idea of caste, will last is not within my means to answer, but it’s time that those who govern spent less time publicizing their own virtues and more money, much more money, funding socially useful works.” At this level, Ernesto slowly start to develop his political consciousness in order to propose a solution to this misery which was slowly taking all over Latin America. Indeed, misery and poverty were something increasingly common in Latin America at this time. Population growth and its cumulative effect is without doubt a massive phenomenon of contemporary history of the continent. The total population is 160 million in 1955, 275 million in 1970. Accompanied by a massive rural exodus, this growth has caused the cities and towns and has increased the level of poverty and impoverishment of many individuals in large cities of the Latin American continent.

Later, on their way to visit the mine of Chuquicamata, the two hitchhiker met a homeless communist couple who were looking for a job in the mine. They made a strong impression on the young Ernesto who saw in this couple real human beings, beautiful in misery and strong in poverty. He described his meeting with the couple as the following: “By the light of the single candle illuminating us (…), the man’s shrunken figure carried a mysterious, tragic air. In his simple, expressive language he recounted his three months in prison, and told us about his starving wife who stood by him with exemplary loyalty, his children left in the care of a kindly neighbor, his fruitless pilgrimage in search of work and his compañeros, mysteriously disappeared and said to be somewhere at the bottom of the sea. (…) the couple, frozen stiff in the desert night, hugging one another, were a live representation of the proletariat of any part of the world.” This meeting push Ernesto Guevara to consider thinking about communism as a possible solution to the misery of his continent.

However, Guevara’s political consciousness really start to appears when he and Alberto Granada started moving into mining country and more especially when they visited the world's largest open-pit mine, Chuquicamata copper mine which is the primary source of Chile's wealth. This mine was seen by a lot of people as the symbol of foreign domination and more especially as the symbol of the US domination on Latin America. Indeed, this mine was run by US mining monopolies which was mainly keeping the benefice for itself when the Chilean workers received almost nothing for this work as dangerous for their health as it was for their life. The reason of those social injustices were because of the economical crash of 1929. Indeed, after the crash, the Latin American economies were hit hard by the global crisis which saw a contraction in international trade. In the great work they devoted to the Latin American dependency, Cardoso and Faletto (Dependency and Development in Latin America, PUF, 1978) distinguish two types of addiction namely where the major export activities are in the hands of a national bourgeoisie and those where they are in hand of foreign companies so-called economical enclaves which were mainly American. Then, Che Guevara will later relate this visit as ” The harsh lessons continued in the chapter “Chuquicamata,” named after the mining town that was “like a scene from a modern drama,” and which he soberly described with a balance of impression, reflection and data. Its greatest lesson was “taught by the graveyards of the mines, containing only a small share of the immense number of people devoured by cave-ins, silica and the hellish climate of the mountain.”. He also later concluded after his stay in Chile that “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, given the quantity of dollars the United States has invested and the ease with which it flexes its economic muscle whenever its interests appear threatened.”

The 24th of March, when the two friends arrived at Tacna in Peru, Ernesto Guevara will declare after a discussion about poverty that as José MartÍ, he wants to link his destiny to the one of the poor of this world. This declaration shows how Guevara’s first trip in Latin America can be considered as the beginning of the growth of his political consciousness and the prelude of his implication in politics.

- Ernesto Guevara, the man of the people or the contributions of his journey to his political conscience

- Ernesto’s feeling about belonging to Latin American population

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