Fidel Castro and Che Guevara in a Prison Cell in Mexico City, 1956 — Their First Photo Together

A young Cuban Marxist revolutionary, Fidel Castro (left), and Argentine Marxist revolutionary, Che Guevara (right), in Miguel Schultz Jail in Mexico City in June-July 1956. This photograph may be the first one showing Castro and Guevara together.

After Fidel Castro’s failed attack on the Moncada Barracks in Cuba in 1953, he was imprisoned and later released under amnesty in 1955. Castro then fled to Mexico, which had become a haven for Latin American revolutionaries. There, he began organizing a new expedition to overthrow Fulgencio Batista, the U.S.-backed dictator of Cuba.

It was in Mexico City in 1955 that Castro met Ernesto “Che” Guevara, an Argentine doctor and Marxist who had been traveling across Latin America. The two men quickly bonded over their shared anti-imperialist ideals and revolutionary goals. Guevara soon joined Castro’s group — the 26th of July Movement — as its physician and one of its most passionate fighters.

In June 1956, Mexican authorities raided a farmhouse in the town of Santa Rosa, near Mexico City, where Castro’s group was training and stockpiling weapons for their planned invasion of Cuba. The authorities arrested Fidel and Raúl Castro, Che Guevara, and several other Cuban exiles.

The group was charged with violating Mexico’s neutrality laws and possessing illegal weapons. They were held for several weeks in Miguel Schultz Prison (also called Palacio de Lecumberri in Mexico City). During their imprisonment, Che and Fidel shared a cell — this is the period captured in a few surviving photographs and accounts that describe their camaraderie and determination.

Thanks to lobbying and financial help from sympathetic contacts, notably Mexican politician Carlos Prío Socarrás (a former Cuban president in exile), the men were released after about a month in prison.

Once freed, they resumed preparations for their invasion. By late November 1956, they secretly boarded the yacht Granma with 82 fighters and sailed from Tuxpan, Mexico, to Cuba. Although the landing was disastrous, only a dozen men survived the initial ambush, it marked the beginning of the Cuban Revolution, which would triumph in 1959.