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Che’s Travels: The Making of a Revolutionary in 1950s Latin America

This edited volume began as a conference I convened in 2006. The decision to organise the conference was the result of, on the one hand, my interest in the figure of Che Guevara as a key historical figure who, despite his importance in Latin American history and the global history of the Cold War, has received very little scholarly attention, and, on the other, travel writing as a field of scholarship and as a source for historical research. Amateurs and journalists, rather than professional historians have produced most of the writing on Che Guevara. The existence of two detailed diaries written by Guevara of his travels in Latin American 1950s offered an unexplored opportunity for historians with expert knowledge of the countries Guevara visited to assess both how Guevara experienced those countries and how he represented them through his writings. I therefore selected authors with a track record in the history of eight Latin American countries in the 1950s and asked them to use the diaries as a point of departure for research into Guevara's travels in Argentina, Chile, Peru (I contributed this chapter), Bolivia, Colombia, Venezuela, Guatemala and Mexico. Each author drew on the diaries and on a number of other sources, including other travel narratives, to discuss the extent to which this travel experience shaped Guevara's perception of the countries he visited, of Latin America more broadly, and of Latin America's relations with the wider world, and particularly the United States. In this way, the research contained in this volume sheds new light on how Guevara's youthful travels shaped his worldview and, indirectly, his praxis during and after the Cuban Revolution.