Che's motorcycle companion dies
english.aljazeera.net | Mar 6th 2011 4:01 AM
Alberto Granado, the motorcycling companion of iconic revolutionary Che
Guevara, has died in Havana at the age of 88, according to Cuban state media.
Granado had lived in Cuba since the early 1960s after being invited to the
Caribbean island by Guevara following the country’s revolution.
His body is to be cremated and his ashes scattered in Argentina, Cuba and
Venezuela as Granado requested, state media said.
Granado, a biochemist, and Guevara, then a young medical student, embarked
together in 1951 on an epic road trip which took them the length of South
America from their native Argentina.
The adventure, in which the pair worked at a lepers’ colony and met
impoverished miners and indigenous South Americans, is credited with fuelling
the sense of injustice that led Guevara to join Fidel Castro’s uprising against
Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista in 1959.
The pair started their journey on a spluttering Norton motorcycle but they were
soon reduced to travelling on foot, by bus or boat, and hitchhiking when the
bike - nicknamed “La Poderosa” or “the powerful one” - broke down irreparably.
Granado’s account of the trip, Traveling with Che Guevara: The Making of a
Revolutionary, as well as Guevara’s diaries, formed the basis for a 2004 film,
The Motorcycle Diaries, directed by Walter Salles and starring Gael García
Bernal as Che and Rodrigo de la Serna as Alberto.
Guevara was killed in Bolivia in 1967 while attempting to foment a revolution
in the Andean country.
Original Page:
http://english.aljazeera.net//news/americas/2011/03/20113675828334566.html
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