Cuban Revolution

The Cuban Revolution was the armed and political struggle that overthrew the government of Fulgencio Batista, who had seized power in a coup in 1952. Led above all by Fidel Castro and his 26th of July Movement, it began with a failed attack on an army barracks in 1953 and ended in victory on 1 January 1959. The new government soon turned towards socialism and the Soviet Union, making Cuba a central arena of the Cold War in the Americas.

Batista had already governed Cuba once before. On 10 March 1952 he took power again by a military coup against President Carlos Prío Socarrás. His second period in power was marked by corruption, close links with organised crime and the Havana gambling business, press censorship and violent repression of opponents. Much of the island's economy, especially sugar, was dominated by American companies. Castro, then a young lawyer, first tried to challenge the coup in the courts, but his case was rejected.

On 26 July 1953 Fidel Castro and his brother Raúl led more than a hundred young fighters against the Moncada Barracks in Santiago de Cuba and a barracks at Bayamo, hoping to spark a national uprising. The attacks failed, and many of the rebels were captured. At his trial Castro gave a long defence speech ending "History will absolve me", which made him famous. Sentenced to fifteen years, he was freed under an amnesty in May 1955 and went into exile in Mexico. There the group took the name 26th of July Movement and was joined by the Argentine doctor Che Guevara.

In late November 1956 the overcrowded yacht Granma left Mexico with 82 men and landed in eastern Cuba on 2 December. Government troops attacked within days, and only a small number, perhaps no more than twenty, survived to regroup in the Sierra Maestra mountains with the help of local peasants. From this base the guerrillas raided army posts, while the movement's urban wing and other groups, such as the Revolutionary Directorate and the Second National Front of the Escambray, fought in the cities and other mountain ranges. In March 1958 the United States imposed an arms embargo on Batista's government, weakening his forces.

In mid-1958 Batista sent some 12,000 soldiers, many of them raw recruits, into the mountains in an offensive known as Operation Verano. It failed, and by August the rebels had escaped encirclement. On 31 December 1958 forces under Guevara, Camilo Cienfuegos and the Revolutionary Directorate took the central city of Santa Clara, and in the early hours of 1 January 1959 Batista fled to the Dominican Republic. Rebel columns entered Havana within days, and Castro arrived there on 8 January after a victory march across the island.

A moderate lawyer, Manuel Urrutia, became provisional president, but real power lay with Castro, who became prime minister in February 1959. Revolutionary courts tried and executed hundreds of members of Batista's security forces. Promised elections were postponed, the press was brought under state control, and land and industries were nationalised, including all American-owned property in 1960. The 26th of July Movement was eventually reorganised as the Communist Party of Cuba in 1965. A steady stream of Cubans, at first mainly from the middle and upper classes, emigrated, most to the United States.

Relations with the United States collapsed: Washington cut diplomatic ties and tightened its embargo in early 1961, and later that year backed the failed Bay of Pigs invasion by Cuban exiles. Cuba turned to the Soviet Union for trade and protection, and the stationing of Soviet nuclear missiles on the island led to the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. The revolution inspired left-wing movements across Latin America and beyond, and Cuba later sent troops abroad, most notably to Angola.

Our 1945 and 1960 maps bracket the revolution; the borders of Cuba did not change, but the 1960 map shows the island just after Castro came to power.