La Lucha

I am sucked into reading the biography of my hero. In fact I would not mind laying around the house reading the biography of Che Ernesto Guevara, all 745 pages of it. I find him so extremely heroical and inspirational. And if you take away the politics of it all and take away whatever political polarity you find yourself on you will see that behind the politics the message, sacrifice, intention and purely the CHARACTER of this man is fascinating.

While I am reading the beginning of his life during childhood and college years I find myself intrigued by all the adventures he went on as a young adult. In fact I am taken back to the movie, Motorcycle Diaries in which his early life was so well portrayed and also by such wonderful landscape. Reading that chapter of his life in the book I can actually imagine it by just thinking about the movie, and it seems even more real.

I am captivated by the fact that he just left off with his friend and started traveling around latin america more often than not scrounging their way through, and sleeping in unimaginable places, hungry, while at other times they managed to become acquaintances of powerful, important people who took them in and showed them a hell of a good time. Sometimes I wish that I was able to do something like that, it would be so wonderful. Although I plan to do something similar when I finish Medical School (became a doctor without borders and help the unprivileged and forgotten). Although I will be doing it as a much older person.

It is very well known that Che Ernesto suffered episodes of severe asthma. Despite that he did not live what I like to call a passive life. He was known from an early age to be daring and fearless, one attribute that the author notes is inherited from his mother who was the same way and a stark contrast to their passive, overly cautious father. One of his fearlessness was eluted to in the book when he jumped into the Amazon river and swam across it! This from a man that has severe asthma, it took him 2 hours to swim across the Amazon, which according to my sources is about 190 km wide. During this episode his friends just stood at the side line screaming at him to come back and not to pursue the danger of swimming across the largest river in the world.

Another interesting fact that intrigued me so far in the book, among so many, is the fact that Che was EXTREMELY well read person. By the time he was 22 years old he had numerous, numerous books, in fact some of the books cited I have never even heard. He read books by french authors such as Victor Hugo or Emile Zolo, in their native tongue. He read poetry, political books, social books, philosophical, you name it he had read it. He read books and poetry from various authors, including french, german, indian and many latin american. His favorite poet was Pablo Naruda.
Well, I must say once again I was astonished, I thought I was well read, but now I see that is nothing compared to Che by the time he was only 22 years old.

One more thing that is a lesson learned is the fact that it is not only important for us to read in order to enlighten our view of the world and in order to have informed, unshakable perspectives, but it is as important to write and reflect on our world and the way we see it. Che for example, always kept a diary, even when he was traveling he would write down everything, he would write poetry, he even wrote a book to his father when he was 20 and way before he became a revolutionary. Now of course all his diaries are published and I can't wait to read them. But do you think Che knew that more than twenty years after his diary will be read by people who revere him? Why did he write, what was the purpose to that? Because every intellectual writes, by writing we learn to communicate, we learn to integrate knowledge in order to shape a perspective and to write it down, we learn how to more effectively express ourselves...



So of course, I have made a list of all the books he has read, many of which I have never heard of and have decided to read them as well, including of course the diaries his father and his Cuban wife Aleida published. Another interesting fact is that Che kept quotes of lines he has read, which is exactly what I have been doing for many years.

The photo above was taken of Che when he was giving a speech in 1964. His speech in itself is captivating, but I love the quote he gives at the end: "Patria o muerte." When people such as me have been displaced from their homeland due to war and when so many have died defending it this particular quote strikes a deep, painful note.