From Che Guevara to Enrique Raab. Argentinian Travellers to Cuban Revolution

Abstract

Travelling to Cuban Revolution implied, throughout the 60-70s in Latin America, a complex historical time in which a crucial destiny, widely imagined as necessary and possible, was radical transformation of the social world. In such sense, this paper studies Argentine travelling narratives about the island, as a particular field of travel literature. Our corpus shows some 60-70s’ important cultural itineraries, not only regarding the discussions which are posed as the text’s topics –aesthetics and/or politics, high culture or popular culture, intellectual curiosity or revolutionary commitment-, but also concerning the different discourse forms used to tell the story of travelling -report, diary, essay, chronicle, fiction narrative-. Therefore, from Ernesto Guevara to Enrique Raab -including Jorge Masetti, Rodolfo Walsh, Ezequiel Martínez Estrada and Leopoldo Marechal-, the article analizes travel cartographies of the revolutionary Cuba, as inseparable from social places occupied by those who were writers: as regards Latin American politicized cultural field of the period, such was a key debate topic.