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Havana, having a bite at Bodeguita.

We’ve been travelling for eight months, and along the way, again and again, we’ve run into the same characters: four renowned travelers who achieved fame through hard work. They also travelled around the world, though in spite of taking the same route, we were never able to get close to them because, among other things, they’re dead. Two sailors, a pirate and a scientist: Captain Cook, who discovered Oceania and hundreds of islands in the Pacific; Captain Cousteau and the crew of the Calypso, diving pioneers; the privateer Sir Francis Drake, half pirate, half gentleman; and Darwin, who followed evolution from one islet to the other using the five continents as his laboratory.

There is no country or place where we’ve been where words were not spoken about one or all of them. Their biographies are so fantastically adventureous that if seen in a movie, we’d think them false or exaggerated. Still, we admit that we never paid attention to their stories. Nor to the stories of other people, events or places we’d heard about several times. Events we believed we knew and facts we didn’t know. Characters that amazed us and others that sickened us. Names, dates, cities we thought we knew but which in fact we’ve discovered on this trip. For better or worse, now they are a part of us, although more than any other there is one that has gained a place in our traveler’s heart: Ernesto “Che” Guevara.

Before, when we saw a portrait of Che we thought of a dead myth or a military hippy displayed as a shabby tattoo or on a cheap t-shirt, or in those motorcycle diaries… Not anymore. Now we finally know his story, and for that we will always pay him tribute. A man with the heart of a child whose ideals made him follow a dreamer called Fidel to free a country that wasn’t even his own. On a boat that barely floated, eighty revolutionaries invaded an island defended by 80,000 soldiers. Never before had such an uneven war been won, yet neither had someone like him been accepted in their ranks. The Argentinean doctor created Radio Rebelde and with his messages he turned the war into a transfer of continuous desertions in a single direction until everyone was on the same side. A college kid converted into commander who, in spite of his asthma, lead his troops during the day and served their doctor during the night. And he treated both sides, without distinction and without a break.

This is the same Che who, being the Industry Minister and President of Banco Cubano, representing his new homeland before the UN and a hero on the streets of half the world, couldn’t stand the idea that other people were oppressed and so dropped everything to free them. As if he were the hero in a comic book, a revolutionary Tintin in a paper world where bullets don’t kill, he went from country to country, from story to story, until he found the poisoned vignette in a Bolivia so poor that it couldn’t even recognize the hero that destiny had sent to save them.

He was killed in cold blood, without a trial or defense, by the same soldiers that arrested him, his corpse exhibited as if it were a hunting trophy. That day, people like Pinochet, Videla, Noriega, Somoza, Stroessner, the military juntas, the Death Squadrons and the CIA and many more celebrated the murder with a toast, because they now had the green light to sow terror and make people disappear across all of America. Because Che wouldn’t have let it happen. Che would have taken the Plaza de Mayo or would have headed for the mountains. Whatever it would have taken, as long as he could get rid of them. And generous as he was, he would have done so by risking his life. That was Che. All or nothing. Fatherland or death.