Short answers, pulled from the story.
The Cuban Revolution is dated from the 1952 Cuban coup in which Batista seized power, through to the 31st of December 1958, when Batista fled Cuba after the fall of Santa Clara. Fidel Castro's forces entered Havana in early January 1959, completing the transfer of power.
On the 26th of July 1953, Fidel and Raúl Castro led upwards of 126 fighters in a multi-pronged assault on the Moncada Barracks in Santiago de Cuba and the barracks in Bayamo. The attack failed decisively. Fidel Castro later claimed five rebels died in battle and fifty-six were executed after capture, including his second-in-command Abel Santamaría.
The Granma carried the Castro brothers and eighty others when it departed Tuxpan, Veracruz, Mexico on the 25th of November 1956, arriving at Playa Las Coloradas on the 2nd of December. Within three days of landing, Batista's army attacked; no more than twenty of the original eighty-two men survived the initial encounters and escaped into the Sierra Maestra mountains.
Ernesto "Che" Guevara joined Fidel Castro's cause after they met in Mexico in July 1955. He survived the Granma landing and was among the fighters at the Battle of La Plata in January 1957. In the final offensive of December 1958, Guevara commanded one of three columns sent to capture Santa Clara, the fall of which precipitated Batista's flight from Cuba.
The United States supplied Batista's government with planes, ships, tanks, and napalm until imposing an arms embargo on the 14th of March 1958. According to journalist Tad Szulc, the U.S. also delivered no less than $50,000 to key leaders of the 26th of July Movement around late 1957 and into 1958. After the revolution, the Eisenhower administration froze Cuban assets and severed diplomatic ties in January 1961, and launched the failed Bay of Pigs Invasion that same year.
Initially, Soviet leaders viewed Castro as a troublemaker and the Cuban Revolution as "one big heresy." Soviet interest shifted after the revolution's success demonstrated that a communist revolution could succeed in Latin America. After U.S.-Cuban relations collapsed, the Soviet Union became Cuba's main ally, a relationship that culminated in the stationing of Soviet nuclear weapons in Cuba in 1962 and the subsequent Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962.