Think Globally (Have a Good Time Locally) : THE MOTORCYCLE DIARIES: A Journey Around South America, <i> By Ernesto “Che” Guevara</i> . <i> Translated by Ann Wright (Verso: $19.95, 156 pp., 16 black-and-white photographs)</i>

The images of the three great pop icons of the 1960s have benefited by their death: John Kennedy, Elvis Presley and Ernesto “Che” Guevara. All three live on: the first, through his family, the second, in the tabloids, and the third, through slogans. “Live like him!” went the cry upon Guevara’s 1967 death in the Andes during a poorly conceived effort at revolution. To live like Che, 39 years old when he was killed by the Bolivian military with advice from the CIA, meant to dedicate one’s self to international revolution, to identify with the proletariat, to be tactically savvy with a universal perspective. If Che had owned a car, he would have decorated it with the bumper sticker, “Think Globally, Act Locally.”

The Che Guevara we have come to know--”Che” being an Argentine version of buddy or pal--met Fidel Castro in the mid 1950s in Mexico. Che appeared to be just the sort of humane insurrectionist Fidel needed, and Castro appealed to Che’s sense of righteousness and cockeyed optimism. Guevara proved his mettle in the revolution, and during the initial years of the Castro government held such posts as president of the National Bank, head of agrarian reform and Minister of Industry. But he was restless, and with his boss’s blessings trotted the globe shoring up support in Communist countries and gauging revolutionary potential in others.

As an Argentine he had a natural arrogance--the Texans of South America, his compatriots are called--but he wore it well. Charles Kuralt, who interviewed him for CBS, thought him “a pompous braggart,” but within Cuba, among the common people, he was highly esteemed, all the more so as a foreigner who chose to work on their behalf. He was best known for promoting moral incentives over material ones, or at least balancing them; the result he called “The New Man.” By 1965 his utopian notions and even his practical ideas were overrun by the rising bureaucracy, and his plans found diminishing response.

Ernesto Guevara de la Serna was raised in a middle-class family, and not long after graduating college with a degree in medicine, 23-year-old Ernesto roared off with a friend on a 350-cc Norton 500. They were, he later wrote in this extraordinary first-person account, “always curious, investigating everything we set eyes on, sniffing into nooks and crannies, but always detached.” “The Motorcycle Diaries,” written with spunk and keen observation, shows us the conditions that formed the adventurous man later known as Che.

Che’s heirs released “The Motorcycle Diaries” a few years ago, and its readers in Latin America, Europe and now here see an uncomplicated man, one whose politics are just taking shape. For the most part, he and his buddy Alberto Granado were a plucky pair, scamming truck drivers, soldiers and soccer players into feeding and lodging them as they charmed their way through their homeland, then Chile, Peru, Colombia and finally Venezuela.

They fancied themselves bohemians, and who’s to say they weren’t? When they sought help at some strangers’ home, their hosts “appeased our hunger with exquisite roast lamb.” They caught rainbow trout in countryside streams, and one night ate a duck Alberto shot down over a Chilean lake. A national park watchman barbecued a dinner for the two, but their scheme to steal six bottles of red wine was foiled. They stowed away on a ship plying South America’s Pacific coast, and once discovered, were given a room. Looking out at sea, the two concluded “that our vocation, or true vocation, was to roam the highways and waterways of the world forever.”

Some nights they slept outside in howling storms; others, on sheepskin or beneath blankets in warm guest rooms. It took them very little time to get ready for bed: “The difference between our night wear and day wear consisted, generally, of shoes.” At one home, confusing the household dog for a ferocious mountain lion, Ernesto pulled out a gun and killed it. Later, he mused, “I couldn’t ask for a bed in a house where we were considered murderers.” At a small town dance in Chile, a drunken Guevara got too pushy with a mechanic’s wife (“pretty randy and obviously in the mood”), and the townspeople chased after him.

Che and Alberto were, he wrote, “gentlemen of the road. We’d belonged to a time-honored aristocracy of wayfarers.” In Chile, our travelers met a blanket-less Communist couple “numb with cold, huddling together in the desert night, [they] were a living symbol of the proletariat the world over.” They gave the Commies their blanket.

If the two doctors had a plan at all, it was to visit leper colonies to tend the afflicted and learn new treatments. “An accordion player with no fingers on his right hand used little sticks tied to his wrist, the singer was blind and almost all the others were hideously deformed.” The influence of Bolivar and Marti surfaced at the one leprosarium. “We believe,” Guevara told the staff at a going-away luncheon, “that the division of America into unstable and illusory nations is a complete fiction. We are one single mestizo race . . . from Mexico down to the Magellan Straits.”

He sympathized with Indians, however, only at arm’s length. He once got an early morning ride out of town in a truck full of “smelly, flea-ridden” Indians. A Peruvian town had a mayor named Cohen, “who we were told was Jewish, but a good sort.” In Caracas he observed black Venezuelans, “magnificent examples of the African race who have conserved their racial purity by a lack of affinity with washing. . . . The black is indolent and fanciful, he spends his money on frivolity and drink.” This is the unfettered Che, hop-skipping through the Americas reinforcing old attitudes, testing new ones.

Che finished his trip spending August, 1952, in Miami, daily wandering from his downtown room to Miami Beach. “He enjoyed himself as much as he could” wrote his father in an epilogue, “and got to know the United States, at least a small part of it.”

In a postscript, evidently written long afterward, Che sloughed off the easy-going self-deprecation of this book with a stirring, if somewhat self-conscious, declaration of the revolutionary imperative: “When the great guiding spirit cleaves humanity into two antagonistic halves, I will be with the people. . . . I feel my nostrils dilate, savoring the acrid smell of gunpowder and blood, of the enemy’s death; I brace my body, ready for combat.”

If the world eventually came to know Che Guevara and his New Man, in “The Motorcycle Diaries” we see the formative man. It redoubles his image and lends a touch of humanity with enough rough edges to invite controversy.

Throughout Latin America you can still see marketplace tables filled with Che-inspired trinkets for sale--”Tschochkes de Che,” I call them. You can buy key chains, T-shirts, nail clippers and can openers all with his stern visage peering off into the distance. In England you can now drink Che Beer. This spring at La Hihuera, the town where Che died 28 years ago, Bolivian and Cuban students announced plans to establish a Che Guevara Museum.

Che Guevara, whose worldview formed a cornerstone of what evolved into “correct” politics, was happily incorrect, a fact that can only suggest a different perspective of his romantic image. If Che learned about his fellow man as a middle-class bum, why, let’s hear it for middle-class bums.