appetite for wandering was whetted, and Guevara and Granado set out on their grand motorcycle expedition two years later.
They traveled across the Andes, up the west coast and into the Amazon from leprosarium to leprosarium, and even in between presented themselves to hospitals and townspeople as experts in the disease. Afterward Granado returned to the field, in a leprosy hospital in Venezuela, and invited Guevara to join him. Guevara even published a couple of scholarly papers on the disease and wrote his parents toward the end of that odyssey, âIâve become really interested in leprology, but I donât know how long it will last. . . .â
That long road trip on the motorcycle that kept breaking down and was eventually abandoned is how and when Guevara woke up to a particular kind of pain himself and then to his sense of purpose on earth. He encountered the destitute, the dispossessed, the dying, and the outcastâan unemployed miner and his wife shivering without blankets in the Chilean desert, an old woman dying of asthma and poverty, indigenous girls and women groped by soldiers, the pariahs of the leper colonies in the Amazon jungle. He was not quite twenty-five, a handsome, spoiled firstborn son of an upper-class Argentinean family who approached almost everything with an air of scorn and feigned indifference, who took pleasure in offending hosts and violating conventions.
One of his biographers, Jon Lee Anderson, speculates that he had chosen to become a doctor because he watched his grandmother die in agony, but he delayed his exams and took his studies casually. He had known pain long before, and illness, and the nearness of death, lived all his life in and out of that country of the sick. He had since early childhood been prone to brutal asthma attacks. At any moment his bronchial passages might seize up, breathing might become almost impossible, and his whole body racked with pain. Death was always a possibility.
This may have contributed to his savage debonairness, his air of a hero who dared much and feared little. Even on the trip with Granado he often had dangerous attacks that his friend would rescue him from with a big shot of adrenaline. And even with this drastic treatment he would often be unable to function for several hours or a day or more. His health was a bomb that often went off. Maybe asthma was the deus ex machina at the Cuban Revolution.
Doctors help people; they diagnose them; sometimes they alleviate their pain; sometimes they cure them. But they do it one by one, and the causes they address seldom include social or economic conditions. The young Guevara diagnosed the continent and the world as suffering from a disease produced by injustice and prescribed revolution for it, a cure as violent as any surgery. But the diagnosis took a long time and planning his future did too. Step by step he veered from thinking he would continue with medicine.
He did receive his medical degree not long after the motorcycle odyssey but immediately embarked upon further travels across the continent. He then imagined what a revolutionary doctor would be and dreamed of a medicine that would create âa robust body through the work of the whole collectivity, especially the social collectivity.â He and Granado had met a communist doctor who was a leprosy specialist, Hugo Pesce, in Lima, Peru, and Pesce became an important influence on Guevara, both by the example of his commitments and his compassion, and by dispatching the young medics to a leprosy colony in the rain forest of the uppermost Amazon River.
On that adventure, his environment changed; it let in things that he had not encountered or had encountered but not assessed or felt before. âI began to come into close contact with poverty, with hunger, with disease, with the inability to cure a child because of a lack of resources, with the numbness that hunger and continued punishment cause. . . . And I began
They traveled across the Andes, up the west coast and into the Amazon from leprosarium to leprosarium, and even in between presented themselves to hospitals and townspeople as experts in the disease. Afterward Granado returned to the field, in a leprosy hospital in Venezuela, and invited Guevara to join him. Guevara even published a couple of scholarly papers on the disease and wrote his parents toward the end of that odyssey, âIâve become really interested in leprology, but I donât know how long it will last. . . .â
That long road trip on the motorcycle that kept breaking down and was eventually abandoned is how and when Guevara woke up to a particular kind of pain himself and then to his sense of purpose on earth. He encountered the destitute, the dispossessed, the dying, and the outcastâan unemployed miner and his wife shivering without blankets in the Chilean desert, an old woman dying of asthma and poverty, indigenous girls and women groped by soldiers, the pariahs of the leper colonies in the Amazon jungle. He was not quite twenty-five, a handsome, spoiled firstborn son of an upper-class Argentinean family who approached almost everything with an air of scorn and feigned indifference, who took pleasure in offending hosts and violating conventions.
One of his biographers, Jon Lee Anderson, speculates that he had chosen to become a doctor because he watched his grandmother die in agony, but he delayed his exams and took his studies casually. He had known pain long before, and illness, and the nearness of death, lived all his life in and out of that country of the sick. He had since early childhood been prone to brutal asthma attacks. At any moment his bronchial passages might seize up, breathing might become almost impossible, and his whole body racked with pain. Death was always a possibility.
This may have contributed to his savage debonairness, his air of a hero who dared much and feared little. Even on the trip with Granado he often had dangerous attacks that his friend would rescue him from with a big shot of adrenaline. And even with this drastic treatment he would often be unable to function for several hours or a day or more. His health was a bomb that often went off. Maybe asthma was the deus ex machina at the Cuban Revolution.
Doctors help people; they diagnose them; sometimes they alleviate their pain; sometimes they cure them. But they do it one by one, and the causes they address seldom include social or economic conditions. The young Guevara diagnosed the continent and the world as suffering from a disease produced by injustice and prescribed revolution for it, a cure as violent as any surgery. But the diagnosis took a long time and planning his future did too. Step by step he veered from thinking he would continue with medicine.
He did receive his medical degree not long after the motorcycle odyssey but immediately embarked upon further travels across the continent. He then imagined what a revolutionary doctor would be and dreamed of a medicine that would create âa robust body through the work of the whole collectivity, especially the social collectivity.â He and Granado had met a communist doctor who was a leprosy specialist, Hugo Pesce, in Lima, Peru, and Pesce became an important influence on Guevara, both by the example of his commitments and his compassion, and by dispatching the young medics to a leprosy colony in the rain forest of the uppermost Amazon River.
On that adventure, his environment changed; it let in things that he had not encountered or had encountered but not assessed or felt before. âI began to come into close contact with poverty, with hunger, with disease, with the inability to cure a child because of a lack of resources, with the numbness that hunger and continued punishment cause. . . . And I began
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