A youthful friend and traveling companion of Che Guevara during their 1952 motorcycle tour in Latin America, Granado later founded the University of Santiago de Cuba School of Medicine.

He authored the memoir Traveling with Che Guevara: The Making of a Revolutionary, which served as a reference for the 2004 film The Motorcycle Diaries, in which he was played by Rodrigo de la Serna.

[1] In 1930, after José Félix Uriburu toppled the progressive government of Hipólito Yrigoyen, Granado's family relocated to Villa Constitución, province of Santa Fé, due to his father's position as a militant trade unionist.

In his best-selling biography entitled Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life, Jon Lee Anderson describes Granado at this time as "barely five feet tall and had a huge beaked nose, but he sported a barrel chest and a footballer's sturdy bowed legs; he also possessed a good sense of humor and a taste for wine, girls, literature and rugby.

"[5] Asked in an interview many years later about his friendship and time on the road with Guevara, Granado reminisced that "we hit it off well, when there was talk about politics, disease and what not, we almost always shared a similar view.

[7] So between December 29, 1951, and July 1952, Granado embarked on a tour of South America on his beloved Norton 500cc motorcycle — Poderosa II — with his friend Che Guevara.

Throughout their continental excursion, they witnessed first hand the poverty of disenfranchised native peoples and their frequent lack of access to otherwise cheap and basic medical care.

[7] Granado later lamented that although he and Guevara were impressed by the mine's high-tech machinery, "this (was) eclipsed by the indignation aroused when you think that all this wealth only goes to swell the coffers of Yankee capitalism.

"[7] Their encounters with South America's "downtrodden and exploited" such as the migrant sheep shearers, copper miners, and Indian peasantry were a key influence on both their lives.

For Granado, it confirmed that there was a wider world to see and help than the middle classes of his hometown, while in Guevara it ignited a burning zeal to tackle the cause of such misery, which he came to see as capitalism.

[2] These experiences also galvanized both men in realizing their future vocations — Guevara towards Marxist revolutionary politics and Granado to the pursuit of practical science.

The two men did not meet again for eight years, by which time Guevara was a hero of Fidel Castro's 1959 Cuban Revolution and head of the Central Bank of Cuba.

[5] A few years later in 1955, Granado won a scholarship to the Istituto Superiore di Sanità in Rome; while in Europe he visited France, Spain, and Switzerland.

[7] In 1978, he published his account of his and Guevara's 1951–1952 tour of South America, named Con el Che por Sudamerica, in Spanish, Italian, and French.

[11] According to the author: "The story follows the friendship shared between the two friends from when Ernesto was 14 years old and Alberto was in his 20s, outlining all the shared dreams and days, their great adventure through South America and what happened after they went their separate ways following their travels [...] It also contains Granado's reflections on Che's death, the returning of his mortal remains to Cuba and all the difficult stages that the Cuban Revolution and people have lived.