It’s hard to pinpoint exactly when we came up with the idea for the trip. Literature played an important part. The urge to travel grew from reading Ciro Alegría’s4 books The Golden Serpent, The Hungry Dogs and Broad and Alien Is the World, all of which I had eagerly devoured.
I needed to see the world, but first I wanted to see Latin America, my own long-suffering continent—not through the eyes of a tourist, interested only in landscapes, comforts and fleeting pleasures, but with the eyes and spirit of one of the people, someone wanting to know about the continent’s beauty, its riches, the men and women who live there, as well as Latin America’s enemies, within and without, who exploit and impoverish us.
So from 1940 on, “the trip” became a journey through South America. Two years later, in 1942, Ernesto Guevara de la Serna—El Pelao, or Baldy, of my youth—came onto the scene, joining my usual audience of parents and brothers. With his natural irony and genius for criticism and argument, Pelao added a fresh note to our routine discussions of the Utopian journey.
Though barely fourteen years old, Pelao’s uncommon acumen (a perspicacity he retained throughout his extraordinary life) allowed him to see that while for my parents and even my brothers the journey was little more than an agreeable topic of conversation, a pretext for widening our knowledge of geography and politics, for me it was as real and tangible as the fact that I would one day become a biochemist, an honest scientist who would not sell out.
From that year on, Ernesto backed all my ideas and projects. Almost a decade passed before the plan became a reality, and whenever he detected a weakening in my resolve he would chime in with his refrain, “So, what about the trip, then?” I had only one answer, “Anything can go wrong, except that.”
My friendship with Ernesto grew year by year, and our need to embark on the journey became more imperative.
The main events of that decade pass through my mind as if glimpsed through a kaleidoscope: the student struggles in defense of democratic, bourgeois freedom, threatened at the time by our own local Nazism, which—dressed up as nationalism—seemed to be taking over the country; the persecution and imprisonment of the real champions of the Argentine people; the clash between students and reactionary teachers, which spurred us to do better than those who kowtowed to gain favoritism.
It was during those years that Ernesto and I had become aware of the Soviet Union and its titanic struggle against the Nazi hordes trying to wipe the world’s first socialist country off the face of the earth. In our eyes, Stalingrad, Leningrad, Brest and Moscow took on a new dimension. The heroism of the Soviet people could not be silenced by the alleged defenders of freedom and democracy.
The war years revealed the dishonesty of the capitalist press as their tissue of lies about the “red terror” and popular unrest vanished in the face of the unity of the people, the government and the Soviet Communist Party.
In 1945, I got my first appointment as a junior practitioner. This gave me my first opportunity to work in research, something I’ve never given up, although from time to time life has imposed other duties. A year later, I began to work in the J. J. Puente Leprosarium, in Córdoba. A fascinating world opened up before me.
The scourge of leprosy forces its victims out of society and at the same time makes them particularly sensitive and grateful. Anyone who has seen a leprosarium cannot but be won over by such a community of outcasts. During this period, Ernesto and I stayed in touch. By now his nickname El Pelao was replaced by Fúser—short for Furibundo, or Furious Guevara Serna—a tribute to his tenacity and fearlessness at rugby, the sport that, like soccer before it and shooting afterward, now filled our few free hours.
One day Fúser arrived in the remote hospital where I worked, hundreds of miles from Buenos Aires, on a bike with a motor fit only for the paved avenues of the city, but which Ernesto, with his determination and courage, had brought across plains, mountains and deserts.
Around this time I bought my “Poderosa II,” a powerful Norton 500 cc motorcycle, named after “Poderosa I,” the bike I’d used day in and day out during my student years for distributing leaflets at demonstrations and then eluding my police pursuers, as well as for outings to the rivers, lakes and mountains of my native Córdoba.
My sporadic meetings with Pelao confirmed how much we had in common. Literature gave us a lot to talk about. Around this time, a group of North American authors were first published in Argentina, among them Erskine Caldwell, Sinclair Lewis and William Faulkner, who laid bare the hypocrisy of American capitalist society and its discrimination against Hispanics and blacks.
Our interpretations of the works of Sartre and Camus, with their philosophical and political implications, gave rise to further discussion as we camped under starry skies, sharing maté, ideas and dreams around a cozy camp fire. Almost ten years went by in this way, seeing each other now and again; but rather than deter us, the passage of time gave us more and more reasons for undertaking our long-desired journey through Latin America.
Alberto Granado, Mial
Havana, October 1978