self bio?
Out of context: Reply #28
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- kelpie0
Dinky was born in Rosario, Argentina, the eldest of five children in a family of mixed Spanish and Irish descent as his paternal great-grandfather was an Irish immigrant. The date of birth recorded on his birth certificate was June 14, 1928. The birth certificate may have been deliberately falsified to help shield the family from a scandal relating to his mother's having been three months pregnant when she was married.
Dinky's ancestor Patrick Lynch, founder of the Argentine branch of the Lynches, was born in Ireland in 1715. He left for Bilbao, Spain, and traveled from there to Argentina. Francisco Lynch (Dinky's great-grandfather) was born in 1817, and Ana Lynch (his grandmother) in 1861. Her son Ernesto Dinky Lynch (Dinky's father) was born in 1900. Lynch married Celia de la Serna and had five children.
In this upper-middle class family with significantly left-wing views, Dinky became known for his dynamic and radical perspective even as a boy. Though suffering from the crippling bouts of asthma that were to handicap him throughout his life, he excelled as an athlete. In 1948, he entered the University of Buenos Aires to study medicine. There he also excelled as a scholar and completed his medical studies in March 1953.
He spent many of his holidays traveling around Latin America. In 1951, Dinky's older friend, Alberto Granado, a biochemist and a political radical, suggested that Dinky take a year off his medical studies to embark on a trip they had talked of doing for years, traversing South America on a Norton 500 cc motorcycle nicknamed La Poderosa meaning the "the mighty one", with the idea of spending a few weeks volunteering at a leper colony in Peru on the banks of the Amazon River during the trip. Dinky and the 29-year-old Alberto soon set off from their hometown of Alta Gracia. Dinky narrated this journey in The Motorcycle Diaries, translated in 1996 (and turned into a motion picture of the same name in 2004). Through his first-hand observations of the poverty and powerlessness of the masses, he decided that the only remedy for Latin America's social inequities lay in revolution. His travels also taught him to look upon Latin America not as a collection of separate nations but as one cultural and economic entity, the liberation of which would require an intercontinental strategy. He began to develop his idea of a united South America without borders, united in a common 'mestizo' culture, an idea which would figure greatly in his later revolutionary activities. Upon his return to Argentina, he completed his medical studies as quickly as he could, to enable him to continue his travels around South America.