Motorcycle Diaries

Watched it in honor, in remembrance, of Alberto Granado, who passed away on 6 March. Subtitled were hard-coded, as it were, and could not be hidden. In fact, they helped, for some of the Argentinian spoken was difficult to comprehend. A beautiful movie, very well done.

These days communism is out of favor, and it is disdained as a failed ideology that caused nothing but harm and destruction. Yet taking a fresh look at one who became a communist, and embodies romanticism and idealism in his iconic figure is a reminder that Ernesto Guevara became a communist as a result of seeing misery and exploitation in his native continent, and searching for a solution. Ché remains frozen in time, his face an icon that is used to sell beer as much as to represent a romantic longing.


Ernesto was an idealist, an adventurer, and a doctor. One semester before graduating medical school he took a trip through western South America with his compañero Alberto Granado. What they saw changed them. This film depicts the motorcycle trip they took from Argentina, through Chile, Bolivia, Peru, Colombia and Venezuela. It is inspired film work.

Nobel a platform for outspoken Vargas Llosa

The Nobel Prize in literature brings a long-awaited accolade to Peruvian author Mario Vargas Llosa, and also a new platform for him to assail leftist leaders Hugo Chavez of Venezuela and Fidel Castro of Cuba.

Fidel is an anachronism, as he himself recognizes.

Vargas Llosa has regularly directed barbs at Chavez, denouncing him as autocratic. When the novelist visited Venezuela last year to attend a pro-democracy forum, he was stopped by authorities at the airport for nearly two hours. He said he was questioned and told that as a foreigner he didn't "have the right to make political statements" in Venezuela.

What a bunch of mierda. People who are afraid of words are cowards, and will, in the long run, lose.

Chavez disputed that account at the time, saying his critics were putting on a show to discredit his government. Chavez invited Vargas Llosa and other intellectuals to debate on live television, then backed away from a direct debate after critics suggested a one-on-one contest with Vargas Llosa — with equal time for each.

Chávez would look a fool debating Llosa one-on-one. In a gaggle, he could let pandemonium and disorder be his allies, as he usually does.

He burst onto the literary scene in the early 1960s with the novel "The Time of the Hero" (the Spanish title was "La Ciudad y los Perros") — a book that drew on his experiences at a Peruvian military academy and angered the country's military. One thousand copies of the novel were burned by military authorities, with some generals calling the book false and Vargas Llosa a communist.

How ironic. Then again, irony is the stuff of life.

Vargas Llosa Is Awarded Nobel Prize in Literature

The Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa, whose deeply political work vividly examines the perils of power and corruption in Latin America, won the 2010 Nobel Prize in Literature on Thursday. Announcing the award in Stockholm, the Swedish Academy praised Mr. Vargas Llosa “for his cartography of the structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual’s resistance, revolt and defeat.”


In an interview with The Times in 2002, Mr. Vargas Llosa said that it was the novelist’s obligation to question real life. “I don’t think there is a great fiction that is not an essential contradiction of the world as it is,” he said. “The Inquisition forbade the novel for 300 years in Latin America. I think they understood very well the seditious consequence that fiction can have on the human spirit.’”