I’ve been studying a lot the life of Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara, not because I agree with him or his ideas (which, on the record, I oppose by principle), but because as a fellow Hispanic, a student with revolutionary ambitions, I have felt that my trip, my stay, my travel to a foreign land, has changed me forever and has developed my ideas to extents I would have never thought of.

I cannot really say this is my attempt at writing my own Motorcycle Diaries. Not everyone has had the same luck, or rather circumstances similar enough to ‘enjoy’ a certain lifestyle that has been sold to us as the ideal of success and personal development. But I do know about it: I have achieved something none of my peers back home have: not only I got to finish my studies at home with a sense of honors (not due to my grades, but rather because of what I did thereafter) but also because I managed to ‘get out’ to continue with my formation and training.

In the place I come from, the fact that someone gets to study abroad seems to be a landmark event in one’s lifetime. I am not talking about those small courses that happen for a week or less, I am talking about literally going for a long extent, attending normal classes and living, making a life in a different country.

Hispanic elites seem to have perfected this practice to the minute detail: they either did it in their youth, or their descendants are doing it now. The younger the person, the highest his status in the social hierarchy, only due to the fact of having ‘studied abroad’. The study program, the degree, even the university, they hardly matter if one does manage to get out. Of course, there is still certain prestige in attending the traditional elite nests in the Anglosphere or in some other less considered destinations.

But the fact remains the same: all top officers in government, big enterprise or private academia in Latin America have gotten their foreign experience, and have returned to their fiefs in the New World with that Old World prestige only an expensive piece of paper could provide.

How does Che Guevara fit into all of this, one may ask? The answer is not easy, and there is no interest in making it easy, because the life and story of Ernesto Guevara de la Serna, ‘Fuser’, as he was also known before becoming a revolutionary, is what matters in this account.

Because as everyday goes by, I get to reflect and and see myself in Che’s story, in what probably can be the strangest, most paradoxical turns I’ve taken in my life. Or maybe not. Maybe I’ve finally found my rebellious spark, and for once, I think I know how and where to guide it.

In that sense, what is going to follow is my perception of Che’s life to the same point I’ve arrived in mine, and with it, see how I could make sure to follow a similar path, from the other side. This may sound self-aggrandizing, megalomaniac even, but I don’t really want the glory, I don’t want the false recognition that can be bought through a safe position in a broken system.

I want to put myself in danger, to place a target in my back and show my fellow brothers and sisters in Christ that someone has to do it. Someone has to start. And as I haven’t found who to follow yet, maybe that means my call is to lead others into whatever the future throws at us.

Ernesto, like me, was an Hispanic American, born into a relatively wealthy family with both pre-independence and foreign roots. He had Basque and Irish blood, I have Italian, Neapolitan to be more exact, and Castilian, maybe Portuguese one.

In our teenage years, we were both rugbiers, although I never got the chance to go further with that passion as he did. I also don’t have the asthma he had, nor a cool nickname I got from my agressive playing style in the field. But I hold the memory and I think that could also be a common feature that shaped him as it shaped me. 

Fuser studied medicine, I studied law. Both are some of the classic, old and traditional profession for our higher-middle class, honorable occupations to lead a bourgeois life in peace, curing the sick, defending justice. At least in principle, or at least that what we were told when we began to study. And it probably is, if one doesn’t get involved in the tribulations of power and wealth.

But Ernesto and I were curious, driven to explore outside our little platoons, our small provinces. We wanted to look further, to see above our noses and to go where none of our ancestors nor our peers would dream to go. He went first to the north of Argentina, his home country, I had my chances to go to Alabama, to Chile, to DC…

And in the end, that drive pushed us to what might be the trip of our lives, the one that changed our soul to the point that forward there would be nothing but lifelong fight for principles and ideas.

Ernesto went around Latin America in a motorcycle with his friend Alberto Granado, and ended up in Mexico, becoming ‘El Che‘ as he joined Fidel Castro’s guerilla to take over Cuba in a Marxist revolution. I ended up coming alone to Poland, traveling around some of the territories of the old Habsburg Danubian monarchy, and without any clear ideas of where this will lead me or what I’ll end up becoming.

What do I have in common with that cold-blooded killer, with that terrorist, with that leftist doctor? How does his path reflects mine? I am still not sure, and I hope I’ll never be, because his path was his alone, and his ideas were as opposed to mine as night can be to day.

But that doesn’t mean I cannot see how he ended up as he did, because I feel, deep inside, that same drive to fight and write, to lead and think, to give myself to a cause. The difference is that I haven’t been able to do so yet.

In Ender’s Game, the famous military science fiction novel, author Orson Scott Card wrote the following quote and attributed it to the protagonist, Andrew ‘Ender’ Wiggin, the child-commander that achieved victory over humanity’s alien enemy, the Formics, by exterminating them, and act which decades and centuries later became infamous and gave him the regretful title of ‘Xenocide’:

“In the moment when I truly understand my enemy, understand him well enough to defeat him, then in that very moment I also love him. I think it’s impossible to really understand somebody, what they want, what they believe, and not love them the way they love themselves.”

Socialism, and the left, in whatever form it has adopted, have been my ‘enemies’ since I first began to have something of a political consciousness. But it took me all this years to grow up and mature in my ideas to try to study them without bias or prejudice. I cannot say I love ‘El Che‘, but there’s a special sense of connection between his story and my the way my life has been in the last years, and I cannot say I hate him. I have bonded with him as an historical figure, and by bonding with that symbol, I have come to understand him. And from his life and works I think I’ve also understood the one thing that was his, as many others’, drive and reason to fight, of their fanatical devotion to a cause.

Che was 23 when he began his motorcycle trip, the same age I had when I arrived to Poland, and he was 25 when his political career began as such. I still have enough time to follow his footsteps in that sense.

In his trips, he saw a reality and that reality shaped the ideas he had studied since his childhood. His trips gave form to the personal qualities he had and made them useful in a very specific purpose: that of revolution. My travels through a foreign land, one in which language has been a struggle I try to conquer every day, little by little, may also be the shapers of my personal doctrine, of the body of ideas that define my drive, my goals, my objetives.

In my latest works, there are two pieces I consider to be my best, aside from my book, which has become the main public exponent of my thought: my paper on populism and elite theory, and my article on why the right needs a Che Guevara of its own. They represent a break and turn in they way I think, they mean the exact moment I broke away from a closed system, organized by a blind following to only certain schools and authors.

The first allowed me to think through the strategy I wanted to see be applied by someone, a leader to follow. It meant trying to be a strategist more than a captain. The second meant the first time I spoke highly of what I consider an honorable enemy, an equal to try to rival. There’s admiration in praising one’s opponents, and by doing so, I tried to humble myself and see the rights of the ones who think different than me.

But in thinking for others, even if considering our enemies qualities, there isn’t much meaning. I might as well work as an intellectual mercenary and sell my work at the best offer, like many other of my peers.

Away from my beloved Andes, surrounded by the endless plains and the Red Brick Gothic of Kraków, only my parent’s love and the music of Argentinian composer and ronrroco player Gustavo Santaolalla have kept me grounded and rooted to certain idea of homeland, of patriotic nostalgia, whatever that means when allegiances can only lie with one’s family, one’s ancestors, and ones small plot of land.

Santaolalla’s Apertura, from the Motorcycle Diaries’ movie soundtrack, has also become my daily opening, from the moment I wake up to work (because unlike many of the foreign-educated elites back in Latin America, funded who-knows-how, I am supporting myself in this journey) and it follows me up to the moment I finish studying and go back to my place to sleep.

I titled this essay as Motorcycle-less Diaries in Vistula Land for many reasons, many of them related to my paradoxical admiration to Che Guevara and to my current life in Poland.

Motorcycle Diaries, Che’s travel log during his Latin American trip with his friend Alberto, and the movie that was based on it, have become two of my favorite books and films since I first discovered them years ago, still as a young and naive libertarian law student.

La Poderosa, as it was christened by Ernesto and Alberto, meant their freedom to move around various countries, until it finally broke down. Old and rusty, but it was freedom nonetheless. However, as I don’t have a motorcycle to drive around here in Kraków, my diaries couldn’t really be titled the same, could they? Hence, Motorcycle-less.

Vistula Land is a much more obscure reference, though, for it means the name that was imposed upon Poland by their Russian occupiers during the time of the partitions, as a punishment for the Poles’ many uprisings and attempts to break free from their control.

I decided to use the same name to refer to the country that has welcomed me because in all of its beauty, its history, its tradition, it is still under occupation. This occupation, however, is not military, and not political either, but rather spiritual. Poland seems to be forgetting that there is an intrinsic need for true independence and autonomy in its promotion of a Latin, Christian and Western civilization.

Thus, the spiritual occupation of the Polish nation exists between long held and reasonably justifiable grudges against an eternal enemy, the same that partitioned the country and took the biggest piece, and foreign powers that have exploited those grudges to escalate conflicts they are not willing to fight themselves.

As such, Vistula Land is probably one of the most beautiful and peaceful bloodlands in the world, and some sense of freedom might be found in here, but it also needs to be refound by the Poles. It needs to become their drive just as my circumstances are becoming my drive to become what I might need to be, either here or there.

And that’s why Che Guevara, in all of his crimes, all of his misguided ideas, might be the the adequate example to look for inspiration in this case. It takes courage to take your enemies as your guiding lights. It takes a larger toll on our spiritual capacity to rationalize his actions and take the opposite course. In short, it is a challenge.

So this is my testimony, this is me bearing witness to my own promise to try to become what the cause I believe in needs. I have long written about how we need leaders in our movement, but I’ve never realized that maybe that’s no one’s call but mine. 

At some point we need to become accountable not only for our ideas, but also for our actions. And the right actions are guided by the right ideas. Che was wrong, but he acted. And that’s why I think he should be studied as much as I have. Because we also need to act. I need to act. Because I fear no one else will. And we no longer have time to spare.

So in the same way as Ernesto Guevara de la Serna was changed by driving around Latin America in that old bike, I am feeling changed by coming to Poland, and living, struggling, surviving and overcoming these obstacles life puts in front of me. 

Maybe the Vistula is my Poderosa, and maybe this log is my travel diary. I only know that what comes next is maybe is what made Ernesto become El Che. And maybe it is also what might make me become what I need to be.