Riding My Father's Motorcycle by ALEIDA GUEVARA

[HuckleB]

Riding My Father's Motorcycle

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/09/opinion/09guevara.html?oref=login

"When I read "The Motorcycle Diaries" for the first time, it was just a sheaf of typewritten pages. Still, I identified immediately with this man who narrated his adventures in such a spontaneous way. As I continued reading, I began to realize that the writer was my father.

There were moments when I took his traveling companion's place on the motorbike and clung to my dad's back, journeying with him over the mountains and around the lakes. I admit there were some points at which I stopped reading, especially when he describes so graphically things I would never talk about myself. When he does, however, he reveals yet again just how honest and unconventional he could be. To tell you the truth, the more I read, the more in love I was with the boy my father had been.

I got to know the young Ernesto Che Guevara better: the 23-year-old who left Argentina with a yearning for adventure and dreams of the great deeds he would perform, and who, as he discovered the reality of our continent, continued to mature as a human being and to develop as a social being. Slowly we see how his dreams and ambitions changed.

The young man who makes us smile at the beginning with his absurdities and craziness becomes increasingly sensitive as he tells us about the complex indigenous world of Latin America, the poverty of its people and the exploitation to which they are submitted. In spite of it all, he never loses his sense of humor, which instead becomes finer and more subtle.

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