The Motorcycle Diaries (book) - Transformation

Transformation

Historians and biographers now agree that the experience had a profound impact on Guevara, who later became one of the most famous guerrilla leaders in history. "His political and social awakening has very much to do with this face-to-face contact with poverty, exploitation, illness, and suffering", said Carlos M. Vilas, a history professor at the Universidad Nacional de Lanús in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

In May 2005, Alberto Granado described their journey to the BBC, stating: "The most important thing was to realise that we had a common sensibility for the things that were wrong and unjust." According to Granado, their time at the leper colony of San Pablo in the Amazon also proved pivotal. Recalling that they shared everything with the sick people and describing Guevara's wave on departure as follows: "I got the impression that Che was saying goodbye to institutional medicine and becoming a doctor of the people." Granado later observed that by the end of their journey, "We were just a pair of vagabonds with knapsacks on our backs, the dust of the road covering us, mere shadows of our old aristocratic egos."

According to his daughter Aleida Guevara in a 2004 article, throughout the book we can see how Guevara became aware that what poor people needed was not his scientific knowledge as a doctor, but his strength and persistence to bring social change.