26th of July Movement

• 1. Introduction

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  The 26th of July Movement takes its name from a raid that failed. On the 26th of July 1953, a young Fidel Castro led an attack on the Moncada Barracks, an army facility in Santiago de Cuba. He aimed to spark an uprising against the dictator Fulgencio Batista. The attack collapsed within hours, and Castro was captured. Yet the movement that carried that date in its name would later be remembered as the leading organization of the Cuban Revolution. Six years after the failed raid, its guerrilla forces marched into Havana while Batista fled the country. What turned a defeated raid into a name that outlived it? How did a handful of exiles rebuild themselves into a force capable of driving a dictator from power? And what did that same movement do once it actually held power?

• 2. Founding and Near Disaster

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  Sentenced to 15 years in prison, Castro won an amnesty after just two years, following a political campaign waged on his and his group's behalf. In 1955 he traveled to Mexico to rebuild the movement, joined by fellow exiles Raúl Castro, Camilo Cienfuegos, and Juan Almeida Bosque. Their orders were to assemble a disciplined guerrilla force capable of overthrowing Batista.

  The group's original core, built around veterans of the Moncada attack, merged with Rafael García Bárcena's National Revolutionary Movement and most of the Orthodox Youth. Frank País's National Revolutionary Action joined soon after, and shared opposition to Batista drew in young recruits from across the political spectrum. Castro cast the movement as a continuation of the Ten Years' War and the War of Independence, Cuba's earlier fights against colonial rule.

  On the 2nd of December 1956-82 men came ashore in Cuba aboard the boat Granma, having sailed from Tuxpan in Veracruz, Mexico. They landed in daylight and were immediately attacked by the Cuban Air Force, taking heavy casualties. The landing party split in two and wandered lost for two days, abandoning most of their supplies where they came ashore. A peasant guide then betrayed them into an ambush that killed still more of the group. Batista's government mistakenly announced that Castro had died. Of the 82 men who sailed on the Granma, only 22 eventually regrouped in the Sierra Maestra mountains.

  Civic Resistance groups were forming in Cuban cities even as the survivors regrouped in the mountains, adding pressure on Batista from another direction. The poor and many middle-class and professional Cubans, worn down by years of corruption, began flocking to Castro's side. In the Sierra Maestra, the guerrillas drew hundreds of volunteers and started winning battles against the Cuban Army. Che Guevara, who had trained as a doctor, was shot in the neck and chest during one engagement but was not severely hurt. He kept treating other wounded fighters afterward. That opening phase of fighting stretched on for two more years. It ended in January 1959, when Batista fled to the Dominican Republic in the early hours of New Year's Day. The Movement's forces marched into Havana as he left.

  The war that had begun with a wandering, decimated landing party would still need to be won in the mountains and in the cities alike.

• 3. War on Two Fronts

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  By February 1958, the guerrillas' ranks had grown to 400 men, still dwarfed by Batista's reported army of 50,000 troops. Only 10,000 of those troops could actually be deployed against the guerrillas at once. Between April and August 1958, Batista sent an offensive force of 10,000 men, backed by air and land support. Its goal was to encircle and destroy the guerrillas hidden in the Sierra. The campaign ended in decisive failure. After two years of war, the rebels finally broke Batista's forces, driving them to flee to the Dominican Republic. They seized power on the 1st of January 1959. By then the Movement's ranks had swelled to between 20,000 and 30,000 guerrillas, and the war had killed between 1,000 and 2,500 people.

  In the countryside, guerrillas burned sugar cane fields and oil refineries, blocked bridges and trains, and struck directly at Batista's soldiers. In the cities, M-26-7 members cut telephone lines, organized strikes, kidnapped public figures, bombed government buildings, and assassinated officials. Both tactics were part of a deliberate strategy to spread crisis and destabilize Batista's public and economic order.

  Radio Rebelde began broadcasting on the 24th of February 1958, carrying the Movement's message and casting its violent tactics in a sympathetic light. The Movement also welcomed foreign journalists into its camps, including the New York Times war correspondent Herbert Matthews. It also hosted the American military intelligence agent Andrew St. George. Both domestic and international propaganda aimed to explain the Movement's goals and glorify its guerrilla fighters, building sympathy at home and abroad.

  Winning battles was only half the guerrillas' task; the territory those battles cleared still had to be run.

• 4. Governing the Sierra

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  The Movement split its operations between rural guerrillas based in the Sierra Maestra and an urban underground in the towns and cities. That underground was made up mostly of middle-class and professional Cubans. Castro directed his own efforts toward fighting Batista's soldiers in the countryside and toward liberating and governing territory as it fell under Movement control. Peasant men and women joined the Movement's ranks in large numbers, serving as soldiers, collaborators, and informants against Batista's regime.

  The Campesino Association, an active Communist organization since 1934, gave the Movement access to an established network of peasant political organizing. Many peasant leaders held ties to the Popular Socialist Party and used those Communist connections to recruit support for the Movement. Leaders of the Authentic Party and the Orthodox Party, representing small, medium, and wealthy landowners, backed the Movement as well. They offered funding and protection from Batista's forces. Castro's later push for agrarian reform would break that alliance with the wealthier landowners.

  Peasants living under Movement control paid taxes to it and faced fines or prison sentences for tax evasion, banditry, marijuana cultivation and possession, or cockfighting. In return, the Movement ran elementary schools and literacy programs, set up hospitals and medical services, maintained toll roads, and protected peasants from bandits.

  On the 3rd of August 1958, Castro created the Agrarian Bureau to oversee Oriente province. A month later, in September 1958, he set up the Administración Civil para los Territorios Liberados to administer the Sierra Maestra itself.

  That rural bureaucracy ran on rules the guerrillas wrote themselves, while a very different kind of Movement was operating out of sight, inside Cuba's cities.

• 5. The Underground in the Cities

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  In 1955, Castro named Frank País chief of action for Oriente province after País folded his own organization, Oriente Revolutionary Action, into the Movement. País centralized the urban underground's operations under a leadership body called the National Directorate and moved the Movement's headquarters from Havana to Santiago. He organized six separate sections handling organization, labor outreach, and civic resistance among the middle class. The other three covered sabotage and an urban militia, propaganda, and a treasury for raising funds.

  País tried to back Castro's Granma landing with an armed uprising in Santiago on the 30th of November 1956, but it failed. Once Castro and the surviving guerrillas regrouped in the Sierra Maestra, they depended on their urban counterparts for supplies. That meant medicine, weapons, ammunition, food, equipment, clothing, and money, along with propaganda production and publicity. The urban underground also organized worker strikes and ran patriotic clubs for Cuban exiles in the United States, raising funds for arms and ammunition.

  The Movement frequently coordinated with other anti-Batista groups in the cities, including the Popular Socialist Party, the Student Revolutionary Directorate, and the Organización Auténtica. By May 1957, arrests and killings had thinned the ranks of the Student Directorate and the Auténtica. The Popular Socialist Party's history of cooperating with Batista further weakened its standing. By then, the Movement had become the dominant anti-Batista force in Cuban cities.

  Santiago police assassinated Frank País in July 1957, setting off mass demonstrations and worker strikes that spread from the city across the island. Those protests built toward a nationwide general strike on the 5th of August 1957, which had only limited success. The Movement still believed the strike's speed and popularity meant a future national strike could destabilize Batista's government enough to topple it. A second national strike, called for the 9th of April 1958, failed instead. It was undone by Batista's preparedness and poor communication between the Movement and labor groups. Many Movement members were killed in firefights with police and soldiers while trying to stage an armed uprising amid the chaos.

  Once Batista was gone, the coalition that beat him would have to decide what kind of Cuba came next.

• 6. Cuba Turns Left

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  A new government led by Manuel Urrutia Lleó took power once the guerrillas overran Batista's last troops on the 31st of December 1958. Anti-Batistas, liberals, urban workers, peasants, and idealists became the Movement's dominant followers in the new Cuba. The Movement merged with other groups to form the United Party of the Cuban Socialist Revolution, which became the Communist Party of Cuba in 1965. Cuba modeled itself on the Warsaw Pact nations of Eastern Europe, becoming the first socialist government in the Americas.

  United States exports to Cuba fell by half within just two years, after Castro's government heavily taxed American products and nationalized hundreds of private companies. Some of those were local subsidiaries of American corporations. The government also seized private land as opposition grew, both from dissident party members and from the United States. That opposition sharpened once it became clear Cuba would adopt a strict Marxist-Leninist system. The Eisenhower Administration answered with trade restrictions on everything except food and medical supplies, and Cuba turned to the Soviet Union for trade instead. The United States then cut all diplomatic ties with Cuba.

  In April 1961, a CIA-trained force of Cuban exiles and dissidents, including former Movement supporters, launched the unsuccessful Bay of Pigs Invasion against Cuba. It came shortly after Castro had declared the revolution socialist, and once the invasion failed, he formally proclaimed himself a communist.

  That declaration would soon collide with a group that had backed the Movement from its earliest days in the mountains: the Catholic Church.

• 7. A Break with the Church

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  Catholic students and priests had supported the Movement throughout the fight against Batista, but its 1959 victory opened a rift with the Church. Catholic leaders resisted the Movement's agrarian reform program and what they saw as Castro's turn toward Soviet Communism.

  The National Catholic Congress protested what it called a lack of Catholic values in the Movement's policies. On the 17th of July 1959, a riot broke out in front of the Cathedral of Havana between Church representatives and pro-Castro protesters. Castro publicly denounced the leadership of the Roman Catholic Church on the 12th of August.

  On the 6th of January 1960, Movement militants occupied Catholic seminaries, churches, and schools across Cuba, arresting the leaders of the Young Catholic Workers.

  After the failed Bay of Pigs Invasion, the Movement closed more churches. It also detained a number of priests and bishops on the 17th of April 1961. The Catholic Church was expelled from Cuba on the 1st of May. That expulsion came alongside the nationalization of all private colleges and the removal of foreign priests from the island.

  The same Movement that expelled Cuba's Catholic clergy had built its ranks around a very different set of alliances. Those alliances would reshape who counted as Cuban after 1959.

• 8. Gender, Race, and Memory

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  Women made up just 10% of the Cuban workforce, yet they took part in the Movement disproportionately, producing propaganda and joining demonstrations and picket lines. In September 1958, the Movement established the Mariana Grajales, an all-female military unit. After the Revolution, the new government created the Federation of Cuban Women to bring women into Cuban political, social, and economic life. It also aimed to eliminate prostitution.

  After Batista's fall, reforms including land redistribution and expanded government education and medical services disproportionately benefited Afro-Cuban Cubans. Castro and the Movement had made racial integration a central plank of their program, and public spaces were quickly desegregated as a result. Critics have since argued that the Movement's racial policies also repressed independent black political organizing. They point to rhetoric that downplayed racial consciousness by claiming the Revolution had already ended racism, despite prejudice that lingered on the island.

  Cuba has marked the 26th of July as a national holiday every year since 1959. Community mobilizations, reenactments, and recitations each year honor the Moncada attack and the Movement's role in overthrowing Batista. Between 1967 and 1973, three museums opened in Santiago, Villa Blanca, and Moncada to commemorate the assault and the Movement's actions. The Movement's flag still appears on the shoulder of the Cuban military uniform. It remains a symbol of the Cuban Revolution, one that has outlasted the organization that carried it.

  The flag is the only piece of the Movement still in everyday use. The organization itself had already dissolved on the 26th of March 1962. It folded into the United Party of the Cuban Socialist Revolution and its communist program.