chapter 9 Mariátegui and Che: Reflections on and around Walter Salles’s The Motorcycle Diaries

In 1952, Ernesto Guevara, a young medical student then known under the moniker of ‘Fúser’, arrived in Lima with his friend and travelling companion Alberto Granado, a recently minted pharmacist with whom he had been trav- elling throughout the continent. But, without entirely abandoning the wander- lust and curiosity for other cultures and peoples that had fuelled their travels since they had left the city of Rosario in Argentina, Ernesto and Alberto came to the capital of Peru with a more specific purpose: to learn how to best treat leprosy under the tutelage of Hugo Pesce, who was according to Guevara’s real- life diaries, an ‘expert leprologist’.1 One must remember that leprosy was still incurable and that the social stigma associated with the disease lent, at least in the popular mind, an aura of sainthood to those dedicated to treating and caring for its victims.2 Arguably, their interest in leprosy evidences the idealism of both Guevara and Granado. Thus it was perhaps not surprising that Pesce, in Guevara’s words, ‘welcomed us with extraordinary kindness’.3 He procured the two Argentine adventurers lodgings in a hospital and had them over for meals.4 But the Peruvian doctor’s generosity was also intellectual. Years later, Guevara, now known as ‘Che’, the most charismatic leader of the Cuban Revolution, would send a copy of his GuerrillaWarfare to Pesce with a significant dedication: ‘To Dr. Hugo Pesce who provoked, perhaps without knowing, a great change in my attitude towards life and society’.5 In the popularly and critically successful 2004 film The Motorcycle Diaries, based on Guevara’s travel diaries with the same title and Granado’s Traveling

1 Guevara 2006, p. 135. 2 Lavonne Neff writes about this connection: ‘Nowadays, leprosy … can be halted with antibiot- ics, and is virtually unknown in North America and Europe. Once, however, it was considered a fate worse than death. Not only did lepers suffer from a then-incurable wasting disease; they also had to deal with the community’s fear of infection. A diagnosis of leprosy turned a per- son into a pariah … No wonder saints were often identified by their kindness to lepers’ (Neff 2005, p. 31). 3 Guevara 2006, p. 135. 4 Guevara 2006, p. 145. 5 Quoted in Kohan 2000, p. 198.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2021 | doi:10.1163/9789004441866_010 186 chapter 9 with Che Guevara, Brazilian director Walter Salles and Puerto Rican screen- writer José Rivera have fleshed out and dramatised the encounter between Pesce and Guevara. There, Pesce, portrayed by the Peruvian actor Gustavo Bueno, is shown handing books from his library to Guevara, played by Gael García Bernal. ‘This is Mariátegui. You also have to read César Vallejo’, Pesce advises the young Argentine adventurer, as he hands him the books.6 While Vallejo is not mentioned again in the movie, Mariátegui plays a brief but central role in Salles’s and Rivera’s depiction of Guevara’s political development. Soon after, he is shown on his bed reading Mariátegui’s Seven Essays. While Guevara reads, one hears the filmic Pesce begin a brief summary of the Peruvian Marx- ist’s ideas:

Mariátegui basically talks about the revolutionary potential of the Indians and peasants of Latin America. He says that the problem of the Indian is the problem of the land. And that the revolution will not be copy or imit- ation but the heroic creation of our people. We are too few to be divided, he says. Everything unites us. Nothing divides us.7

The film thus presents a relatively accurate summary of the Peruvian Marxist’s most characteristic ideas, though not all of these are found in Seven Essays, the book Guevara is shown as reading.8 In counterpoint to the voice-over, the film cuts to a montage of stills, appar- ently photographs taken by the filmic Guevara and Granado in Argentina, Chile and the Peruvian Andes – the locations they visited before arriving to Lima. These are images of the poverty and exploitation they have seen during their journey, but also of survival. By juxtaposing Mariátegui’s ideas with these pic- tures, the film makes the point that by reading Seven Essays Guevara is able to

6 Salles 2004. I have provided my own translations of the dialogue from the movie. 7 Salles 2004. 8 The ‘problem of the Indian is the problem of the land’ summarises one of the basic insights of Seven Essays: ‘The problem of the Indian is rooted in the land tenure system of our eco- nomy’ (Mariátegui 1971, p. 22). As we have seen, the reference to ‘copy or imitation, but heroic creation’ comes from ‘Anniversary and Balance Sheet’ (1928), the important Amauta editorial published by Mariátegui after his break with the APRA (Mariátegui 2011b, p. 130). The ending phrase ‘Everything unites us, nothing divides us’ comes from ‘Message to the Workers’ Con- gress’ (1927), where Mariátegui states: ‘Nothing divides us. Everything unites us’ (Mariátegui 2011, p. 183). The film’s summary of Mariátegui’s ideas is, therefore, accurate, with the excep- tion that the call for unity was made within the context of an address to a workers’ congress. Therefore, rather than a call for Pan-Latin American unity, as the film seems to imply, it is an explicit call for working-class unity regardless of political tendency – be it reformist, anarch- ist, or socialist; see ‘José Carlos Mariátegui and the Culture of Politics’.