Source: WTL© digital photograph (2008) taken on site in Guatemala City.
Comments: We are about to enter the famous bar-restaurant El Portal, which is the most famous meeting, eating, and drinking place for generations of Guatemala's political, artistic, and intellectual elites. Before he joined Fidel Castro's revolution in Cuba in the 1950s, Ernesto (Che) Guevara frequented this bar. It was here, among other places, that his own communist ideology, convictions, and praxis crystalized. El Portal is also famous for being the focal physical space in the Nobel Prize-winning novel, El Señor Presidente (1946), by Miguel Angel Asturias (1899-1974). For Asturias, see: Notes on 20th Century Literature.