The mythical meeting of Fidel Castro and Che Guevara in “The country of the bite”

Here, in Mexico, Che became Che, says Paco Ingacio Taibo II, General Director of the Economic Culture Fund, in the introduction of the documentary The Che and Fidel. Ernesto before Che, his passage through Mexico City. In 1955, Che met the Castro brothers in the Tabacalera neighborhood, in the Mexican capital and forged a strong friendship with Fidel, with whom he shared a deep “anti -apricot” feeling. It was also here in Mexico that the Argentine and the Cuban planned the overthrow of the then president and dictator of Cuba, Fulgencio Batista. That historical moment was immortalized 62 years later by the sculptor Óscar Ponzanelli with some bronze figures of Castro and Guevara relaxed sitting on a bench and put on a park in the tobacco company, which were removed during Wednesday, July 16, 2025 for irregularities in permits to install the work, according to the Emecist mayor of the Cuauhtémoc Red of the Vega. The sculptures are no longer, but the history and importance of their encounter prevails.

1954, Tapachula and the country of the bite

Ernesto Guevara crossed the border from Guatemala to Mexico for Tapachula, Chiapas, in 1954. Guevara was present during the coup d’etat orchestrated by the United States to overthrow the President Guatemalan Jacobo Affenz. He arrived in Mexico as an exile. He traveled by train to the Mexican capital, then called the Federal District. Historians and writers say like Óscar de Pablo and Juan Patricio Riveroll that Che arrived without weight. He made a living as a photographer of portraits of people who walked through the Alameda, one of the main streets of the city, and sought to act as a doctor, a career of which he enrolled at the University of Buenos Aires (later he got it).

Historian José Ignacio de Alba tells in his column published in Ppnia, That the instance that Guevara had planned in Mexico was only a technical stop. He was looking for a visa to get to the United States and meet with his relatives. If not, his destiny would be France. But “the country of the bite” arrived, as described in a letter, and two years later, together with Fidel Castro, they would change the political history of the American continent.

THE MEETING WITH THE CASTRO

The revolutionary leader Fidel Castro arrived in Mexico as an exile, after being released from prison after being the head of the assault to the Guillermón Moncada barracks, in Santiago de Cuba, to overthrow the government of Fulgencio Batista, then dictator of the island. Upon arriving in Mexico, he passed through Mérida, Campeche and Veracruz before settling in the Mexican capital.

The encounter between Guevara and Castro happened thanks to the friends that Che made during his passage through Costa Rica and Guatemala. Some attribute the encounter to the Cuban revolutionary Ñico López, who first presented Raúl Castro in the Tabacalera neighborhood and then Castro introduced his younger brother, Fidel.

Fidel and Che congeniated instantly. “I was joined by a deep feeling Antiyanquista“writes The Alba historian. The departmental building of José Emparán 49 Street, in the Tabacalera neighborhood, was the place of the mythical link. Subsequently, they would meet at the bottom of the Coffee Bar Havana to conspire against Fulgencio Batista. The rest, as they say, is history.