46 SMITHSONIAN.COM | November 2019
propagandists thought such tenderness would un-
dermine his reputation as a selfl ess revolutionary
martyr. “Che could do no wrong,” he says. “By the
1990s, he was a cardboard cutout without any fl esh
and blood.”
That began to change with the publication in
1995 of The Motorcycle Diaries, a travel memoir Che
had written when he was an unknown 23-year-old,
about his epic 1952 jaunt with a friend from Buenos
Aires along the spine of the Andes, in part on a rusty,
wheezing motorbike they dubbed La Poderosa (“The
Powerful One”). The bike actually breathed its last
gasp in Chilean Patagonia, forcing the pair to hitch-
hike most of the way. But the disarmingly frank opus
also revealed Che’s inner journey from a shy, lovelorn
and self-absorbed middle-class student to a man who
passionately sympathized with oppressed people all
over Latin America. It became an international best
seller, in part because his youthful, Kerouac-esque
bravura prefi gures his dashing, man-of-action future.
Its reach increased exponentially in 2004 when a fi lm
version was released starring the doe-eyed Gael García
Bernal, fi xing the vision of Che and his two-wheeled
adventures in pop culture for the 21st century. So
when I heard that Che’s youngest son was an avid Har-
ley-Davidson fan leading “Poderosa Tours” around
Cuba, the prospect was compelling, to say the least.
Michael Laverty, whose company Havana Strat-
egies has been running high-end educational trips
from the United States to the island for over a de-
cade, suggested that I take my time asking Ernesto
about his notorious lineage: “He doesn’t like all the
commercial stuff around his father. Most of the time,
he can go into a bar and not be recognized.”
Each of Che’s four children with Aleida have dealt
with their famous lineage in diff erent ways. Alyusha,
now 58, became a doctor. In the 1980s, she volunteered
for duty when Cubans were militarily involved in Nic-
aragua and Angola, and since then she has worked
around the developing world on Cuban medical aid
projects. The second daughter, 54-year-old Celia, is a
marine biologist and now works at the Havana Sea-
quarium specializing in seals and porpoises. She keeps
her distance from the Che connection. Che’s sons,
Camilo, age 57, and Ernesto, faced more of a psycho-
logical burden, according to Anderson: “I always felt
that Che was such a massively iconic fi gure, it must be
very diffi cult to be his son—to look like him and not
be him.” Camilo practiced as a lawyer and (like his fa-
ther) dabbled in photography; he now helps manage
the Che Guevara Study Center opposite their family
home in Havana. But it is Ernesto whose fi lial link has
now become most explicit. What that meant I hoped to
discover after I met up with the biker tour group in the
lobby of the Melia, a stark state-run hotel that looms
over the Malecón, Havana’s seafront promenade.
Hell’s Angels they were not. Like many Harley
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