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Travel · HistoryOn my shelf
Chasing Che: A Motorcycle Journey in Search of the Guevara Legend
Symmes retraces Che Guevara’s transformational 1952 motorcycle journey through South America on his own BMW, following the same route from Argentina through Chile, Peru, and Bolivia to Cuba, seeking out the people and places that shaped the young medical student before he became a revolutionary icon.
Chasing Che works as both travel adventure and serious inquiry into how a myth forms: Symmes talks to Guevara’s surviving travel companion Alberto Granado and others who knew him, while his own misadventures on the road provide a wry, grounded counterpoint to the romanticized legend most readers arrive with.
History · Cuba
The Boys from Dolores: Fidel Castro’s Schoolmates from Revolution to Exile
Symmes tracks down dozens of Fidel Castro’s former classmates from the elite Jesuit-run Colegio de Dolores in Santiago, Cuba, using their scattered lives — some in exile, some who fought alongside Castro, some who later opposed him — to tell the story of Cuba’s revolution and the generation it consumed.
Named to the New York Times’ Ten Best Books list, this is Symmes’s more ambitious and serious book, built from years of tracking down aging alumni across Miami, Havana, and beyond. It offers a portrait of Castro and the Cuban Revolution unavailable from official histories on either side.
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From the bookshelf
“History's losers.”
— Patrick Symmes, on Cuban exiles
For more travel writing that chases the person behind a political myth, browse the full shelf.
