By the time Guevara reached Mexico and struggled to find consistent employment, it is clear that he was quite politically restless. From his own writings of the time, and from the accounts of others, one gets the impression that at this point he had developed revolutionary ideas, without any real practical outlet for them. In a letter to his mother in late 1954, he expresses his respect for communists in Guatemala and says that 'sooner or later I will join the Party myself' (Guevara 2001: 88). It is quite opportune then, that in July of 1995, he was introduced to the Cuban exile Fidel Castro. Castro had recently arrived in Mexico City after being released from prison for organising and participating in the July 1953 attack on the Moncada army garrison in Santiago, Cuba, as part of an effect to overthrow the Batista dictatorship. In their first meeting, Ernesto Guevara decided to join the Cubans' planned expedition to return to Cuba to begin a guerrilla war against the Batista dictatorship.