JPSE

The Politics of Travel

Georgetown Univ., Washington, D.C., March-April 2012

The Fall of the New Man?:

Che Guevara's The Bolivian Diary
From his adolescent years onward, Ernesto Guevara recorded his lifes
events assiduously, and his initial excursions offered the young Che abundant
opportunities for both personal and ideological growth. He later committed to
paper his travel experiences in the form of a plethora of travel narratives. Travel
was clearly a tool that served Guevara well in his ideological crossing from the
comforts of a semi-bourgeois lifestyle in his native Argentina to one of social
consciousness and revolutionary societal change. Indeed, from his early bicycle
journey through the writings that emerge from his final days in Bolivia, Ches
personal travel memoirs serve not only as a reflection of his personal process of
concientizacinthey display his evolving identity as an ideological traveller
but also as the locus of much of his most profound ideological meditations on
his vision of societal change through revolution and socialism.
Todays presentation extends the mapping of the intertwined relationship
between transformative travel and ideology proposed in my recent essay in
Studies in Travel Writing on Guevaras Reminiscences of the Cuban
Revolutionary War, to the travelogue that serves as the coda to Ches travel
writings: his 1967 diary written during the campaign in Bolivia. Reading The
Bolivian Diary through the precepts offered up in Guevaras seminal 1965
essay, Socialism and Man in Cuba, I hope to flesh out the tensions that unfold
in this diary between Guevaras idealistic revolutionary zeal for the creation of a
new post-capitalist society and the praxis of such ideals.
Ernesto Guevara de la Sernaborn in Rosario, Argentina, in 1928is
perhaps one of the quintessential ideological travellers of the twentieth century.
From his familys recurrent moves within Argentina during his early years
through his final days in Bolivia, Guevaras life was one of frequent transition.
As a young man, Guevara travelled extensively within Argentina and before
graduating from college with a degree in medicine in April 1953, carrying out
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two extensive tours in the Americas. At the end of his second journey, he met
Fidel Castro in Mexico City in July of 1955 and subsequently joined the rebel
expedition to Cuba. At the end of the Revolutionary war in Cuba, Comandante,
Guevara held important posts in the government and travelled the globe to
represent Cuba on the international stage. In April 1965, Guevara left Cuba to
dedicate himself to the internationalisation of the Revolution in other locales.
From 1965 through to his death in 1967, travelled extensively and participated
in failed revolutionary movements in the Congo and Bolivia. On October 8,
1967, he was captured by CIA-trained Bolivian Rangers, and was summarily
executed the next day. His remains were repatriated to Cuba in June 1997. In
the decades since his death, of course, his subversive identity has become
known world-wide. Indeed, Guevara has since become the poster child for both
subversive causes and even bourgeois chic.
Interest in Guevaras travel writings is a more recent phenomenon, most
definitely spurred on by Walter Salles 2004 movie, The Motorcycle Diaries
which sparked a resurgent interest in him in comandante. However, Ches first
travelogue was published in the early 1990s in both Europe and Cuba and
subsequent publications of his other travel writings from that period onward has
created a bourgeoning interest in Che as a traveller and travel writer.
Correspondingly, critical interest in Ches travel writings has increased,
including both monographic works and broader analyses of Guevara within the
realm of travel writing studies. A case in point is critic Maureen Moynaghs
2008 study on political tourism where Guevaras travels loom, indeed, quite .
In Political Tourism and Its Texts, the Moynagh analyses the cultural practice
of political tourism [and] the textual representation [of] political tours of late
modern writers and intellectuals. For the author, the political tourist belongs
to a particular category of traveller, [] who seeks to participate in or manifest
solidarity with a political struggle taking place elsewhere in the world. The
author classifies Ches first two travel texts, as well as Reminiscences of the
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Cuban Revolutionary War, as the works of a political tourist, proclaiming

Guevara to be, in essence, the paradigmatic political tourist to whom other
travellers of the same ilk have historically paid direct or indirect homage in their
travels to politically charged locales around the world.
While her analysis in this work is intriguing and surely helps illuminate
my own work on Che, I differ with her on one important point. There is most
surely a qualitative difference between what should more aptly be called forms
of ideological travel, and political tourism. This is particularly relevant in the
case of Che. The degree of engagement with an ideological principle is quite
different when the distinguishing factor between being a political tourist and
playing an integral part in a revolutionary endeavour is returning home
unscathed after a political tour, and putting ones life on the line in a foreign
battlefield for an ideal. This lack of distinction in terms of Che as a traveller and
travel writer is an oversimplification of the nature of the ideological journey that
motivated Guevara in his early travels, especially the travels that took him into
the bowels of the Cuban Revolutionary War effort where his life was on the line
on a daily basis. His experience in the Sierra Maestra reveals a different sense
of commitment to a cause. This is also seen in Ches diaries on the
revolutionary war in the Congo and in Bolivia. In all three of these cases, Che
could not simply catch the next bus home after a days labours in the battle
field. His commitment to the internationalist cause displays a much more
profound identification with a cause than a simple political tourist.
With this qualification in mind, Moynaghs understanding of the
relationship between world citizenship, imagining a different kind of
belonging and a different kind of human relationship, [and] a different practice
of the self that committed travellers display is useful. This proposal, adjoined
with Guevaras ideology, help explain the internationalist spirit that led Che to
Africa and South America after the triumph of the revolutionary war in Cuba.
His physical efforts in and writings on both the Congo and Bolivia confirm his
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intentions to extend the ideal of the creation of a new ideologically conscious

social agent to other nations and to subvert the established order of
postcolonial/neoimperial capitalist society by taking aim at the primary
construct on which much of Western civilization is based: the self-serving,
socially-unconscious individual. Guevaras retort is the need to create a New
Man to lead societys evolution towards socialism.
Guevaras understanding of this new social agent formally appears in his
seminal essay Socialism and Man in Cuba, written in early 1965, after Che
had left Cuba and was travelling in Africa in advance of his war efforts in the
Congo. The New Man proposal, firmly rooted in Guevaras experiences in the
Revolutionary war, is indicative of his integrative understanding of socialist
culture and the capacity of conscious travel to lead to social change. The New
Manwhom he envisioned as leading Cuba towards a bright, socialist
futurewas to construct a post-capitalist culture based on the existence of a
profoundly radical sense of social consciousness, which is achieved via a
process of concientizacin. Guevaras own concientizacin had begun to reveal
itself in his early travel writings and reaches it apogee in his Reminiscences of
the Revolutionary War in Cuba where Guevara's travels as a combatant in the
Revolutionary war led him to an entirely different level of social consciousness
and adherence to socialism.
The socialist society Che sought to create in post-Revolutionary Cuba
was predicated on the understanding of the need for a symbiotic relationship
between the self and the collective, societal other in the journey towards
socialism. The symbiosis of these two social agents, the lessons gleaned from
the concientizacin of his travels, forms the basis for the construct of the New
Man of the post-capitalist society in Cuba. The qualities of selflessness that
Guevaras New Man would display, are seen in his contribution to the societal
collective in terms of effort, comradeship, and altruistic spirit, brought together
by a unifying cohesive political consciousness that breaks down the affective
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distance between the self and the other in the creation of the new society in
socialist germination. Guevara modelled the New Man construct constantly
while in Cuba through his voluntary labour efforts and his frequent speeches to
communist youth organizations, workers, students and party members. In 1965,
he saw fit to leave Cuba to extend this vision as an internationalist.
The New Man forged in the Cuba Revolution turned out to be more
difficult to reproduce in other ideological contexts, and this fact reveals itself in
both the Congo and the Bolivian diaries. Time limits preclude me from delving
into a profound discussion of the Congo diary today, but it must be stated that it
is in Africa where the chinks in the armour of the New Man construct begin to
appear. A brief foray into the Congo indeed contextualises the Bolivian
experience.
In what has been labelled as the African dream, Guevara left for the Congo in
April of 1965 with a contingent of experienced and socially conscious AfroCuban rebel fighters in support of Congolese rebel leader Laurent Kabila. His
seven-month experience there was less than productive. Guevaras own
recollection of the Congo war from his Congo diary sets an undeniable tone:
This is the history of a failure, he states in the introduction to the diary. Yet,
Ches characteristically analytical approach to phenomena is forward-thinking:
[I]n my view, any importance the story might have lies in the fact that it allows
the experiences to be extracted for the use [by] other revolutionary movements.
Guevara envisaged the Cuban effort in the Congo as an embryonic
International Proletarian Army which, in his words, should not die at the first
failure. To that end, his Congo diary seeks to analyse in depth the problems
[encountered] and find a solution for them. Extending his typical analysis even
further, Che states
The idea that guided us was to ensure that men experienced in
liberation battles [] fought alongside men without experience,
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and thereby bring about what we called the "Cubanisation" of the

Congolese. [] the effect was the exact opposite, [] a
"Congolisation" of the Cubans took place over a period of time.
Ches position on the ideological consciousness of the soldiers fighting in the
Congo had been made known to Castro. In a letter to Fidel written in October of
1965, Che clarifies his needs for rebel fighters more specifically: In my
previous letters, I asked to be sent not many people but cadres; there is no real
lack of arms here [] - indeed there are too many armed men; what is lacking
are soldiers. Ches appeals for conscious fighters is quite relevant. His
perception of the Congo affair was that the Congolese rebels non-socially
conscious attitudes and habits had actually corrupted the battle-hardened and
conscious Cuban soldiers, leading to a profound decline in their fighting
moralea point made worse when the Cubans heard the content of the
farewell letter Che had written to Fidel before leaving Cuba in which he
renounced his Cuban citizenship, official posts, and declared his intention to
leave the island nation to export the revolution. Faced with those circumstances,
Guevara sets himself up as the paradigm for the type of true rebel fighter he
needed on the ground in the Congo. By maintaining a groundless optimism in
the face of the [] situation, Che states I can assure you that were it not for
me, this fine dream would have collapsed with catastrophe all around.
In these writings, Guevara points to the following ideas: 1) That what was
needed in the Congo, and thus, anywhere that the International Proletarian
Army was to fight, were ideologically conscious soldiers, incorruptible cadres
like those who had fought alongside him in the revolutionary war in Cuba; and
2) that he was the person who exemplified this sort of soldier through his
optimismthat is, idealism. As the embodiment of the New Man mitigating
factor, of course, is the fact that Guevara thought that he should have led the
rebels in the Congo. Che had not been allowed to lead the forces. As Egyptian
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leader Gamal Abdel Nasser had told Guevara before arriving in the Congo, a
white man could not lead a group of black African rebels in a post-colonial firefight, as he would be perceived as a sort of Tarzan figure.
The implications of these writings from Africa are quite germane to
Guevaras next step: his intended incursion to lead a revolutionary war in
Bolivia. After an extended stay in Dar es Salaam and then Prague, Guevara
returned in secret to Cuba and personally selected a group of Cuban cadres
whom he could trust to accompany and fight with him in Bolivia. He entered
Bolivia with a fake passport on November 3, 1966, and engaged with operatives
on the ground who had begun to set the stage for the Ejrcito de Liberacin
Nacional de Bolivia that Guevara planned to lead into battle against the USsupported military government of Boliviathe lesson in Africa had taught Che
that he had to take charge, and he did. This gesture, however, brings into
question the symbiotic relationship between the self and the collective,
societal other that had be the backbone of the Cuban Revolutionary war. This
pitted Guevara against the Bolivian Communist Party leader, Mario Monje,
which set the stage for the failure of the armed conflict in Bolivia and his
eventual death.
As previously noted, Guevara kept a diary throughout his life, and his
Bolivian diary tells the story of the venture in that country. On November 7,
1966, Guevara began the construction of a military camp at a farm in southern
Bolivia, near the ancahuaz river, with a small cohort of battle-seasoned
Cuban soldiers and untrained Bolivian fighters. The conditions at the camp are
found to be very poor and the diary becomes eerily reminiscent of the sort of
physical challenges Che narrates in his first diary: in his Bolivian diary,
Guevara narrates how the men are pestered by insects and foul weather, are
often plagued by hunger and dysentery, and get injured and even die due to
foolish mistakes, such as fording rivers. Not knowing the terrain, due to the
poor maps they have, they also get lost, find themselves caught up in terrible
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thickets, and have a difficult time finding their way without local guides. The
need for local guides, naturally understates the fact that, not unlike in the
Congo, the menthe Cubans and the Bolivians alikeare in unknown
territory, both on geographic and socio-cultural levels.
This is not the first time that Guevara finds himself in this sort of
unknown territory, of course. During the revolutionary war in Cuba virtually
all of the initial fighting had been done in rural areas in the Sierra Maestra with
an army predominantly composed of campesino recruits. Indeed, the peasant
recruits had been the backbone of the Cuban revolutionary army as Che states in
Reminiscences of the Revolutionary War in Cuba. Those recruits had become
conscious rebel soldiers through their efforts and came, too, to exemplify the
model of the New Man whom Guevara envisioned.
His first entry on that day, however, foretells the failure of Guevaras
experience in Bolivia. Upon arrival at the farm that night, me meets three
workers from the party who are there, awaiting his arrival. He had been
driven to the location by another member of the Bolivian Communist Party.
None of them were experienced combatants. The Bolivian recruits were
predominantly inexperienced city boys without much training or capacity to
deal with physical hardships. Nor did they have an understanding of the lay of
the land they were in or of the languages spoken by local peasants. In addition,
there numbers were very few. Perhaps the more problematic component of their
profile was that they were loyal to the Communist Party president, Mario
Monje, the man who would become Guevaras rival for power and leadership
over any revolution that was to take place in Bolivia.
Guevara, the leader and exemplar of the New Man, does not deal well
with either the political, physical, ideological, geographical, or the cultural
circumstances he finds in Bolivia. After scarcely three days on site, the cover of
the cohort of rebels begins to disappear after a chance encounter with a local
landowner named Ciro Algaraaz, leads the man to be suspicious of their
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activities leading Che, in his own words, to [blow] his top. This instance, on
top of the issue with a politically conservative rural landowner, immediately
jeopardizes the rebel cause, and Guevara is aware of this fact. As he states in his
diary, Everything is deteriorating rapidly; we have to see if we can at least get
our men here. The men, however, do not arrive as promptly as he had
expectednearly three weeks later, the forces only add up to 12 fighters total.
Likewise, Che notes that all the fighters who are there are plagued by insects
and torrential rains.
On an ideological plain, Guevara perceives the inexperienced rebels
irresponsible behaviour, and decides to recur to what had worked in the
Sierra: ideological indoctrination. On December 12, Che takes [the rebel
fighters] to task about the reality of war, emphasizing the importance of a
united command and discipline. Foreshadowing the difficulties he will later
have with Mario Monje, he also warns the Bolivians of the responsibility they
would bear in violating the discipline of the partys line by adopting another
one. The party he alludes to, of course, is not the Bolivian Communist Party.
He envisions the war as an act of the International Proletarian Army, an
extension of the Cuban Revolution. The conflict
The encounter with Monje materializes on December 31st. Monje made
several proposals to Guevara the most important being that he, Monje, would
lead the war effort. Guevara, tested on this aspect in Africa, responds: On the
notion that Monje would act as the rebel leader, Guevara affirms that I had to
be the military chief and would not accept any ambiguity on this [point].
Allowing Monje to consider this position, Che approached the Bolivians who
were in training and gave them the ultimatum: they could either stay or support
the [Bolivian Communist Party]. The implications of this decision were dire.
Without Monjes support in terms of more fighters, Che had to appeal to local
peasants to gain their support. After some initial contact with a local peasant in
early February, Guevara sees that the peasant is unwilling to commit to
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supporting the rebels; within Ches binomial worldview, if the peasant does not
immediately support the rebels, he, too, becomes potentially dangerous. Che,
indeed, would never find support from the indigenous peasants with whom he
entered into contacton the contrary, indigenous peasants who were afraid of
the Bolivian army, provided troops with information on the whereabouts of the
rebels, including on the fateful day when Guevara was captured. In the monthly
summary for April of 1967, Che wrote that The mobilization of peasants is
non-existent.
By the beginning of the Southern Hemisphere winter, the rebels were
increasingly isolated. Although they had won some skirmishes with the
Bolivian army, their heroics were far from being equivalent to the Cuban rebels
who during the Cuban Revolutionary war had become examples of the New
Man who were selfless, altruistic comrades. Che, himself, also shows the
strains born out of wearing that ideological mantle. His diary becomes
increasingly self-centred, focusing on family birthdates to stave off the
monotony of a futile effort. It also begins to describe in depth how he had been
levelled by the impact of the environs on his health. A dreary day, A bad
day and Everything went wrong become the initial phrases of dairy entries as
the Bolivian experience begins to unravel.
The beginning of an entry in late August in which Che describes how the
rebels became lost in unknown terrain is particularly revealing in a figurative
sense of what would soon become the end of the expedition: The day was
spent in a desperate search for a way out, Guevara writes. After a little over 6
weeks more of survival, Che finds that way out, as one after another of the
rebels is caught or killed. On October 8, 1967, he is injured and forced to
surrender in a fire-fight with the Bolivian soldiers who were to relay him to La
Higuera where he would be executed the next day.
Thus, as one can see, Che faced a perfect storm of adverse circumstances in
both Africa and Bolivia, some of which were beyond his purview and others
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which were clearly of his own making. His analytical spirit forced him to see
what had gone wrong in the Congo. Unfortunately, he was not able to write a
preface to his Bolivian diary as he did with his Congo writings. Indeed, it is
important to note that from the depths of his despair at this time came his
apocalyptic Message to the Tricontinental, a text that exhorts revolutionary
hatred, not the love that motivates true revolutionaries as he states in
Socialism and Man in Cuba.
In his work The Marxism of Che Guevara: Philosophy, Economics,
Revolutionary Warfare, Michael Lowy states The dream of all great
revolutionaries, [] has been to change not merely the world but also man:
the revolution, for them, is not only a transformation of social structures,
institutions, and regimes, but also a profound, radical and overturning
(umwlzende) transformation of men, of their consciousness, ways, values, and
habits, of their social relations. A revolution is authentic only if it can create this
new man. In conclusion, I would like to suggest that while Ernesto Guevara,
the man, failed in his personal mission for survival in Bolivia, the
revolutionary message of the ideological example of his New Man continues
to nourish contemporary revolutionary movements and ideology, as evinced by
the ongoing appeal of his proposal for the construction of a post-capitalist future
in our globalized world. We envisage the face of this New Man, and New
Woman, at every juncture where social justice trumps individualism and heroic
acts of selflessness and altruism take place. To quote the purported words of
Che before he was to be executed, Shoot [] you are only killing a man.
Ideas are much harder to kill off, as we all know.

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