Alberto Granado - Travels in South America and Europe

Travels in South America and Europe

At the age of 29 and with full-time work as a biochemist, Granado sought one final thrill before settling into a life of middle-class comfort. So between December 29, 1951 and July 1952, Granado embarked on a tour of South America on his beloved Norton 500cc motorcycle — Poderosa II — with his friend Che Guevara. Both kept diaries on the journey, and would stay at the leprosarium in San Pablo, Peru at trip's end. Throughout their continental excursion, they witnessed first hand the poverty of disenfranchised native peoples and their frequent lack of access to otherwise cheap and basic medical care. In particular, the two men were deeply affected in Chile when they visited the American-owned Anaconda Copper's Chuquicamata copper mine and met workers toiling for pennies and suffering from silicosis. Granado later lamented that although he and Guevara were impressed by the mine's high-tech machinery, "this (was) eclipsed by the indignation aroused when you think that all this wealth only goes to swell the coffers of Yankee capitalism."

Their encounters with South America's "downtrodden and exploited" such as the migrant sheep shearers, copper miners, and Indian peasantry were a key influence on both their lives. For Granado, it confirmed that there was a wider world to see and help than the middle classes of his hometown, while in Guevara it ignited a burning zeal to tackle the cause of such misery, which he came to see as capitalism. These experiences also galvanized both men in realizing their future vocations — Guevara towards Marxist revolutionary politics and Granado to the pursuit of practical science.

"To think that Ernesto, whom I had known since he was 14, would go on to have such an effect on the world was incredible. Before we left Argentina, we didn't know about Latin America, about the enormous gulf between rich and poor and the terrible exploitation of the people. It had a great effect on us."

Granado's journey ended in Caracas, Venezuela, where he remained to work at the Cabo Blanco leprosarium in Maiquetía. Guevara however continued on to Miami before returning home to Buenos Aires to complete his medical degree. The two men did not meet again for eight years, by which time Guevara was a hero of Fidel Castro's 1959 Cuban Revolution and head of Cuba's central bank.

A few years later in 1955, Granado won a scholarship to the Istituto Superiore di Sanità in Rome; while in Europe he visited France, Spain and Switzerland. He married Delia María Duque Duque upon his return.