Alberto Granado, pictured at home in Havana in 2007, was invited to Cuba by Guevara in the early 1960s [EPA]
Alberto Granado, the motorcycling companion of iconic revolutionary Che Guevara, has died in Havana at the age of 88, according to Cuban state media.
Granado had lived in Cuba since the early 1960s after being invited to the Caribbean island by Guevara following the country’s revolution.
His body is to be cremated and his ashes scattered in Argentina, Cuba and Venezuela as Granado requested, state media said.
Granado, a biochemist, and Guevara, then a young medical student, embarked together in 1951 on an epic road trip which took them the length of South America from their native Argentina.
The adventure, in which the pair worked at a colony for leprosy patients and met impoverished miners and indigenous South Americans, is credited with fuelling the sense of injustice that led Guevara to join Fidel Castro’s uprising against Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista in 1959.
The pair started their journey on a spluttering Norton motorcycle but they were soon reduced to travelling on foot, by bus or boat, and hitchhiking when the bike - nicknamed “La Poderosa” or “the powerful one” - broke down irreparably.
Granado’s account of the trip, Traveling with Che Guevara: The Making of a Revolutionary, as well as Guevara’s diaries, formed the basis for a 2004 film, The Motorcycle Diaries, directed by Walter Salles and starring Gael García Bernal as Che and Rodrigo de la Serna as Alberto.
Guevara was killed in Bolivia in 1967 while attempting to foment a revolution in the Andean country.
Alberto Jiménez in 2007 
Alberto Granado Jiménez,  the Argentinian biochemist who was 's companion on his transformative motorcycle trip through South America, died in  on Saturday, reported Cuban state television.  He was 88 and died of natural causes.

The politically active Jiménez met Ernesto "Che" Guevara, then a medical student, in Hernando, Argentina where  Guevara had gone to play rugby. Both were intellectually curious and  interested in exploration. In 1951 they set out on an eight-month motorcycle trip through South American that exposed them to the poverty in which most South Americans lived. The pair worked in a  and met wtih destitute miners and .  Both men kept diaries which served as the basis for the  2004 film, '''', produced by  and directed by .  

According to the '''', "Their road trip awoke in Guevara a social consciousness and political convictions that would turn him into one of the iconic revolutionaries of the 20th century." The trip is widely believed to have inspired Guevara to go to Cuba and join  Fidel Castro in his  against Cuban dictator .

By the time the two men met again eight years later, Guevara was a revolutionary hero and chief of Cuba’s central bank. Jiménez, who had remained in Argentina working in a clinic, accepted Guevara's invitation to move to Cuba in 1961 and founded a medical facility in . Later he moved to Havana where he continued his medical work. The two remained friends although they did not always agree. Jiménez rejected Guevara’s belief that social reform in Latin America had to be accomplished through .

The book ''''  was  published in the 1990's. Jiménez said of the book that it inspired the image of .
  
Jiménez authored the book  ''Traveling with Che Guevara: The Making of a Revolutionary'', published in 2003.