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Alberto Granado Javier Galeano/AP
alberto granado

Che Guevara's motorcycle companion Alberto Granado dies

Granado was a companion on the trip which is said to have awakened the revolutionary inside Che Guevara.

THE MAN WHO accompanied Cuban revolutionary Che Guevara on his famous journey across Latin America, which was immortalised in the book The Motorcycle Diaries, has died.

Alberto Granado was 88-years-old and died in Cuba, Reuters reports.

He had travelled with Guevara across Latin America in the 1950s on an old British motorcycle. Starting in late 1951, the pair documented the continent’s deep poverty in a bestselling book which was later turned in to an equally successful film.

The journey is said to have awakened Guevara’s sense of social justice which would eventually turn him into a leftist revolutionary who was a key figure in Cuba’s 1959 revolution.

He was later captured and killed in Bolivia in 1967 where he had tried to spread his revolution.

Granado, a biochemist originally from Argentina, came to Cuba in 1960 and ended up living there for the rest of his life, teaching at Havana University, according to The Guardian.

He has reportedly requested that he be cremated and his ashes spread in Cuba, Argentina and Venezuela.