ERNESTO GUEVARA DE LA SERNA was born in Rosario, Argentina, on June 14, 1928. While studying for a medical degree in Buenos Aires, he took a trip with his friend Alberto Granado on an old Norton motorcycle through all of Latin America, the basis for The Motorcycle Diaries. During his travels he witnessed the Bolivian revolution in 1953; and, in Guatemala in 1954, the overthrow of the democratically elected government of Jacobo Arbenz by US-backed forces. Forced to leave Guatemala, he went to Mexico City, where he linked up with exiled Cuban revolutionaries and met Fidel Castro in 1955. Che joined their expedition to Cuba, where the revolutionary war began in the Sierra Maestra mountains. At first Che was the troop doctor, and later became Rebel Army commander in July 1957. Following the rebels victory on January 1, 1959, he was a key leader of the new revolutionary government and also of the political organization that in 1965 became the Communist Party of Cuba.
Born in Argentina in 1922, ALBERTO GRANADO was Che's companion on his first motorcycle adventure in Latin America, chronicled in the New York Times Bestseller The Motorcycle Diaries. A doctor and biochemist, Granado lived and worked in Venezuela for several years before moving to Cuba in 1961, where he co-founded the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Santiago. He authored the memoir Traveling with Che Guevara: The Making of a Revolutionary, and retired in 1994.
