The Cuban Revolution is one of the defining events of the twentieth century. In a little over five years, a small band of guerrillas who landed in Cuba in a leaking yacht grew into an army that overthrew a dictator, seized power in Havana, and turned a Caribbean island ninety miles from Florida into a socialist state allied with the Soviet Union. The revolution was led by three men who would become famous far beyond Cuba: Fidel Castro, his brother Raul Castro, and the Argentine doctor turned guerrilla Ernesto Che Guevara. Their story has been told as a heroic liberation, as a betrayal of democratic hopes, and as a cautionary tale about how revolutions change once they hold power. All three versions draw on the same events, and understanding the revolution means holding them together.
To understand why the revolution succeeded, it helps to start with the Cuba it overthrew. Fulgencio Batista, who had dominated Cuban politics since the 1930s, seized power in a coup in 1952, cancelling elections and ruling through the army and police. His government was corrupt, and it was closely tied to American business interests, which controlled much of Cuba’s sugar industry, its utilities, and its tourist trade. In Havana, casinos and hotels flourished for wealthy visitors, while in the countryside many Cubans lived without land, schools, or medical care. Batista’s police suppressed opposition with arrests, torture, and murder. Many Cubans, including people who had no interest in socialism, came to see his regime as illegitimate, and to welcome anyone who promised to end it.
Moncada and the Birth of a Movement
The revolution began, in the usual telling, on July 26, 1953, when Fidel Castro led an attack on the Moncada military barracks in Santiago de Cuba. The attack failed badly. Many of the attackers were killed, and Castro and his brother Raul were captured and put on trial. Castro used the trial to deliver a long defense speech, later published as History Will Absolve Me, in which he set out the movement’s program: land reform, education, health care, and an end to corruption. He was sentenced to prison, but he was amnestied after less than two years, and he went into exile in Mexico. There, he gathered a new group of followers, including Che Guevara, and planned a return to Cuba by sea.
The Granma Landing and the Sierra Maestra
On December 2, 1956, Castro and about eighty men landed in Cuba aboard the yacht Granma. The landing was a disaster. Batista’s forces were waiting, and most of the rebels were killed or captured within days. Only a small group, including the Castro brothers and Guevara, survived to reach the Sierra Maestra mountains in eastern Cuba. There, over the next two years, they built a guerrilla army, with the help of local peasants and of an urban underground that supplied them with weapons, medicine, and information. The guerrillas were outnumbered and outgunned, but they knew the mountains, they had popular support in the countryside, and Batista’s army, demoralized and corrupt, was often unwilling to fight.
The war in the Sierra Maestra was not only a military campaign. It was also a political one. Castro’s movement promised land to the peasants, schools for their children, and an end to Batista’s dictatorship, and it broadcast those promises by radio. In the cities, students and workers organized strikes and sabotage, and Batista’s repression only deepened opposition to his rule. By late 1958, the guerrillas were winning battles in the east, Guevara was leading a column toward the center of the island, and the army was collapsing. On December 31, 1958, Batista fled Cuba, and on January 1, 1959, Castro’s forces entered Havana to the cheers of crowds that filled the streets.
From Liberation to One-Party Rule
The first years of the revolution were a time of hope and of rapid change. The new government carried out land reform, breaking up large estates and giving land to peasants. It launched a literacy campaign that sent young volunteers into the countryside to teach reading, and it expanded health care and education, achievements that even critics of the regime have often acknowledged. Cuba’s poor, who had been ignored under Batista, were for the first time the focus of government policy. At the same time, the revolution moved quickly toward confrontation with the United States. American-owned property was nationalized, relations with Washington deteriorated, and Cuba turned to the Soviet Union for trade, aid, and protection.
That turn had profound consequences. The United States cut off trade, backed the failed Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961, and imposed an embargo that would last for decades. Cuba, in turn, declared itself socialist, allied itself with Moscow, and built a one-party state under the Communist Party, with the press, the courts, and the economy under state control. Supporters argued that these steps were necessary to defend the revolution against American attack. Critics argued that the revolution had betrayed its own promises, replacing one dictatorship with another. Both sides pointed to the same facts. The revolution had freed Cuba from Batista and from American domination, and it had also created a system in which dissent was punished and power was concentrated in the hands of Fidel Castro and a small circle around him.
What the Video Contributes
The video at the center of this chapter tells the story of the revolution through archive footage, and its strength is that it shows the events as they happened, rather than as they were later remembered. It shows the guerrillas in the Sierra Maestra, thin and bearded, moving through the mountains with rifles slung over their shoulders. It shows the triumphant entry into Havana, with crowds waving flags and cheering the young rebels. And it shows the early years of the new government, with its promises of land, education, and health care, and with the men behind the myth, their disagreements, their ambitions, and the choices that would shape Cuba for the next sixty years. Watching the footage now, it is easy to feel the excitement of that moment, and to understand why so many Cubans, and so many people around the world, believed the revolution would change everything.
The Legacy of the Revolution
The Cuban Revolution matters because it showed that a revolution could succeed in America’s backyard, and that a small island could defy a superpower. It inspired revolutionary movements across Latin America, and it became a symbol for people around the world who believed that poverty and inequality could be ended by political struggle. It also matters because it showed how quickly a revolution against a dictator can become a one-party state, and how the justifications for that change, the threat of foreign invasion, the need for unity, the urgency of reform, can be used to silence opposition and to entrench power.