Kahlo's Portrait of the Engineer Eduardo Morillo Safa is a record of one of Kahlo's biggest cheerleaders.

However, as of this writing, there appears to be no public information on the relationship between Safa and Kahlo, except for the fact that he owned more than thirty of her paintings, all of which now belong to the museum established by Dolores Olmedo. In addition to various Safa clan members, Kahlo also painted Safa's mother, and both Kahlo and her critics were fond of that particular portrait. Safa was an engineer and diplomat who first met Kahlo as a fellow student at la Prepa, "the Prep" (Escuela Nacional Preparatoria), the elite high school run by the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). As Kahlo had an affair with Trotsky, became a hard-line Marxist, and survived a horrific bus accident, Safa seems to have cultivated an illustrious political career, and a family, before mostly disappearing from the historical record. Safa owned more than thirty Kahlo paintings, including five portraits of his family members.  When Kahlo released this painting, she was in her first year of teaching at La Esmeralda art school with Rivera and Zúñiga, where all three were, according to critics, pursuing a movement of work honoring indigenous people. 

By this point, near the end of WWII, Kahlo had become famous for her medical conditions, intimate relationships, endless Communism, indigeneity, womanhood, and feminism, each of which positioned her as a political outsider. Like Leonora Carrington, who found refuge from image-conscious European society in Kahlo's city, Kahlo used a surreal approach but did not bow to the will of the theorists of surrealism. At "the Prep," Kahlo was one of only thirty-five women out of about two thousand students. Los Cachuchas was the hip crowd of bohemians at "the Prep" which counted only two women, Kahlo and Carmen Jaime, as members. The art gang took its name from the signature hats its members wore.