Cuban Revolution
The Cuban Revolution began not with a gunshot but with a lawsuit. In the months following the 10th of March 1952 coup, Fidel Castro, then a young lawyer, filed legal arguments in the Cuban courts accusing Fulgencio Batista of corruption and tyranny. The courts rejected the challenge, ruling the coup a legitimate overthrow of the constitution. That rejection would set in motion a years-long armed uprising, the fall of a dictator, and consequences that would reshape Cold War politics across two hemispheres.
Batista had already ruled Cuba once, from 1940 to 1944. When he returned to power by force in 1952, he did so against a backdrop of deep inequality. Nearly one-third of the Cuban labor force lacked full-time employment. In the province of Oriente, there was one physician for every 2,423 inhabitants; in Havana, one for every 227. Only 15% of the rural population had access to running water. Havana itself, meanwhile, had the highest number of Cadillacs per capita in the world in 1954.
What drove a generation of Cubans to take up arms? What transformed a ragged group of fewer than 200 guerrillas into a force that toppled a standing army of 37,000? And what did the revolution ultimately deliver to the island's people? Those are the questions this documentary sets out to answer.
Cuba's formal independence from the United States came on the 20th of May 1902, and its first president, Don Tomás Estrada Palma, was later judged to have upheld the best standards of administrative integrity in the republic's history. That standard did not last.
When an American diplomat named Charles Edward Magoon took over the government following a U.S. intervention in 1906, the surge of American money flowing into the country made corruption difficult to contain. Magoon's successor, José Miguel Gómez, became the first president to be directly entangled in pervasive corruption scandals. These involved alleged bribes paid to legislators in connection with a contract to search Havana harbor.
The corruption deepened with each successive administration. Mario García Menocal, who ran on a slogan of "honesty, peace and work," presided over intensifying fraud between 1913 and 1921. His government benefited from manipulating sugar prices during World War One. Menocal reportedly spent $800 million during his eight years in office and left a floating debt of $40 million.
Alfredo Zayas, who followed Menocal, drew the assessment from historian Calixto Masó of representing the "maximum expression of administrative corruption." By the time Ramón Grau and Carlos Prío Socarrás held office in the late 1940s and early 1950s, the problem had calcified into something close to institutional. Prío was reported to have stolen over $90 million in public funds, an amount equivalent to one quarter of the annual national budget.
Senator Eduardo Chibás founded the Partido Ortodoxo in 1947 specifically to expose this culture. His campaign found an audience partly because Cubans had developed what historian Argote-Freyre describes as a high tolerance for corruption. The population knew who was corrupt, criticized those officials, and yet admired them for their ability to act, as the phrase went, as "criminals with impunity." That tolerance would not survive Batista's second seizure of power.
On the 26th of July 1953, Fidel and Raúl Castro gathered upwards of 126 fighters and launched a coordinated assault on two military installations: the Moncada Barracks in Santiago de Cuba and the barracks in Bayamo. The plan was to spark a nationwide revolt. It failed decisively.
Fidel Castro broke off the attack after recognizing that his recruits lacked adequate knowledge of the barracks layout and sufficient weapons experience. In his autobiography, he claimed that five rebels died in the fighting and an additional fifty-six were executed after being captured. Among the dead was Abel Santamaría, Castro's second-in-command, who was imprisoned, tortured, and executed on the same day as the attack.
At his trial, Fidel Castro spoke for nearly four hours in his own defense, closing with the words: "Condemn me, it does not matter. History will absolve me." The speech built his national reputation. In October 1953, he was sentenced to fifteen years in the Presidio Modelo prison on Isla de Pinos; Raúl received thirteen years.
The imprisonment proved temporary. On the 15th of May 1955, under broad political pressure, Batista freed all political prisoners in Cuba, including the Moncada attackers. Fidel's Jesuit childhood teachers had succeeded in persuading Batista to include both brothers in the release. The revolutionaries regrouped in Mexico, receiving training from Alberto Bayo, a leader of Republican forces in the Spanish Civil War. It was in Mexico, in July of that year, that Fidel met the Argentine revolutionary Ernesto "Che" Guevara.
The exiles named their organization on the 12th of June 1955, calling themselves the 26th of July Movement in reference to the Moncada assault date.
The yacht Granma departed from Tuxpan, Veracruz, Mexico, on the 25th of November 1956, carrying the Castro brothers and eighty others aboard a vessel designed to hold a maximum of twenty-five people. It landed at Playa Las Coloradas on the 2nd of December, two days late because the heavy load slowed its passage.
The late arrival destroyed any chance of a coordinated attack with the urban wing of the Movement. Three days after the rebels came ashore, Batista's army attacked. No more than twenty of the original eighty-two men survived the initial encounters with the Cuban army and escaped into the Sierra Maestra mountains. Among the survivors were Fidel and Raúl Castro, Che Guevara, and Camilo Cienfuegos. Female revolutionaries including Celia Sánchez and Haydée Santamaría, sister of the executed Abel, also assisted Castro's operations from the mountains.
The guerrillas' first clear victory came on the 17th of January 1957, at the village of La Plata in the Sierra Maestra. The battle began at 2:40 in the morning when Fidel fired the first two shots. When rebel explosives failed to detonate, Guevara and Luis Crespo closed in on the barracks; Crespo set it on fire. The garrison surrendered. Two Cuban soldiers died, five were wounded, and three prisoners ultimately succumbed to their injuries. The rebels suffered no casualties and captured nine weapons along with ammunition, clothing, food, and fuel.
Through 1957, the rebel forces remained small, sometimes fewer than 200 men, while the Cuban military and police numbered around 37,000. Yet nearly every engagement ended with the army retreating. In February 1958, a pirate radio station called Radio Rebelde, made possible by Carlos Franqui, began broadcasting the rebels' message nationwide from within enemy territory.
On the 30th of July 1957, Santiago police tracked down and killed Frank País, the 26th of July Movement's urban organizer, shooting him and a companion in the back of the head at a lane called Callejón del Muro. País was buried in his movement's olive green uniform and red and black armband. Santiago's workers declared a spontaneous general strike the same day. That mobilization is now considered one of the most decisive dates in the revolution's history, and the day is marked in Cuba as the Day of the Martyrs of the Revolution.
The United States supplied Batista's government with planes, ships, tanks, napalm, and other military technology throughout much of the conflict, until imposing an arms embargo on the 14th of March 1958. The embargo was consequential: without American spare parts, the Cuban air force could not repair its planes.
On the other side, Yugoslav leader Josip Broz Tito supplied the Cuban rebels. According to journalist Tad Szulc, the United States also began funding the 26th of July Movement around October or November 1957, delivering no less than $50,000 to key rebel leaders, reportedly to cultivate sympathies toward Washington in the event the movement succeeded.
The Second National Front of the Escambray, led by Eloy Gutiérrez Menoyo and William Alexander Morgan, a former U.S. Army soldier who had gone AWOL, kept battalions of the Cuban army tied down in the Escambray Mountains region while Batista concentrated forces against Castro in the Sierra Maestra. CIA-connected Frank Sturgis also trained rebel soldiers in the Sierra Maestra, purchasing weapons and ammunition from Samuel Cummings' International Armament Corporation in Alexandria, Virginia.
On the 6th of September 1957, elements of the Cuban navy at the Cienfuegos Naval Base mutinied in support of the 26th of July Movement. By 5:30 in the morning the base was in rebel hands. By afternoon, government forces arrived from Santa Clara supported by American-supplied B-26 bombers. Street fighting continued through the night. Approximately 70 mutineers and rebel supporters were executed; reprisals against civilians brought the estimated total death toll to 300 men. The use of bombers provided under a U.S.-Cuban arms agreement specifically for hemisphere defense raised formal tensions between the two governments.
Batista launched his largest counteroffensive, called Operation Verano, sending approximately 12,000 soldiers into the Sierra Maestra, around 7,000 of them untrained recruits. The Battle of El Jigüe, fought from the 11th to the 21st of July 1958, is widely considered the turning point. It was followed immediately by the Battle of Las Mercedes on the 29th of July, when Batista's troops nearly destroyed Castro's force of some 300 men.
With his army surrounded, Castro requested a temporary cease-fire on the 1st of August. General Eulogio Cantillo accepted it for reasons that remain unclear. Over the next seven days, while negotiations went nowhere, Castro's forces quietly slipped away. On the 8th of August the Cuban army resumed its attack and found no one. Operation Verano had failed.
Castro then sent three columns against Santa Clara, the capital of Las Villas Province, in December 1958, under Che Guevara, Jaime Vega, and Camilo Cienfuegos. Vega's column was ambushed and destroyed. Cienfuegos, starting with 60 fighters from Castro's core of 230, gained recruits as he marched and arrived at Yaguajay with an estimated 450 to 500 men, facing a garrison of some 250 under Captain Alfredo Abon Lee. After repeated failed assaults, Cienfuegos deployed a homemade tank: a large tractor encased in iron plates with makeshift flamethrowers. It failed. On the 30th of December, Lee ran out of ammunition and surrendered.
On the 31st of December 1958, the Battle of Santa Clara ended with the city falling to the combined forces of Guevara, Cienfuegos, and Revolutionary Directorate rebels. News of the defeat caused Batista to panic. He fled Cuba by air for the Dominican Republic just hours later, on the 1st of January 1959. Castro learned of the flight that morning and immediately began negotiations to take over Santiago de Cuba.
Manuel Urrutia Lleó, Castro's initial choice for president, took office on the 3rd of January 1959. Within weeks, the new provisional government was closing brothels, gambling outlets, and the national lottery, measures that drew immediate resistance from the associated workforce. By the 16th of February, Castro had assumed the role of prime minister following the surprise resignation of the appointed prime minister José Miró.
On the 9th of April 1959, Castro announced that elections promised after the revolution would be delayed by fifteen months. When tensions between Castro and Urrutia became public, angry mobs surrounded the Presidential Palace. Urrutia resigned, and Castro replaced him with Osvaldo Dorticós Torrado, a member of the Popular Socialist Party. The 26th of July Movement itself later reformed along Marxist-Leninist lines, becoming the Communist Party of Cuba in October 1965.
In August 1960, the revolutionary government nationalized all U.S. property in Cuba. The Eisenhower administration responded by freezing Cuban assets on American soil, severing diplomatic ties, and tightening the embargo in January 1961. In 1961, the CIA-trained Brigade 2506, a force of 1,500 soldiers mostly composed of Cuban exiles, landed at the Bay of Pigs; the Cuban military repulsed the invasion. The stationing of Soviet nuclear weapons in Cuba the following year triggered the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962.
Historian Hal Brands characterized Cuba as the ideological and strategic heart of what he calls "Latin America's Cold War." Several rebellions, mainly in the Escambray Mountains, broke out between 1959 and 1965 before being suppressed. The Cuban Exodus that followed Castro's consolidation of power saw large numbers flee primarily to the United States. The U.S. formally reopened its embassy in Havana after more than half a century in August 2015, though the embargo remained in force as of 2025, having been tightened again in 2017.
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Common questions
When did the Cuban Revolution begin and end?
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.
What happened at the Moncada Barracks attack in 1953?
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.
Who was on the Granma and what happened when it landed in Cuba?
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.
What role did Che Guevara play in the Cuban Revolution?
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.
What was the role of the United States during the Cuban Revolution?
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.
How did the Cuban Revolution affect relations between Cuba and the Soviet Union?
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.
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