The Cuban Revolution

It is 1956, and a villain rules over Cuba.  Backed by the U.S. government, a den of gangsters, and the rifles of this soldiers, Fulgencio Batista y Zaldiva has upturned the island’s democracy through a military coup.  He has sold his country to global corporations and opened it up to the mafia.  He and his clique of friends exploit the poor to live a life of decadence and hedonism.  As tourists from America and Europe treat the island as a playground, his people languish and starve.

All dissent is brutally crushed during Batista’s iron-fisted rule, but one man has slipped through his gauntlets.  Over in Mexico, just a few hundred kilometers across the sea, the firebrand lawyer Fidel Castro is planning Batista’s downfall.  Exiled from his homeland, he has just spent two years in prison after a failed attempt at storming the Mocanda barracks intending to spark a popular uprising.  Now with a small group of friends and allies, including a young Argentinian doctor named Ernest “Che” Guevara, he has formed the 26th of July Movement, which aims to take the fight to Batista and free Cuba from his rule.

On 25 November 1956, they board the Granma – 80 revolutionaries cram themselves on a yacht designed to carry 25 people, heading for the Sierra Maestra, the remote mountains in Cuba’s wild East.  Their landing is immediately a disaster.  The revolutionaries get their boat lost and end up stuck in a mangrove swamp, crates of supplies fell overboard, and when they finally make landfall, Batista’s men are waiting for them.

The next few days are spent under constant attack, until finally Fidel, Che, and their surviving comrades make it into the Sierra Maestra mountains.  This range in the east of the island had long been a refuge from those attempting to escape the state: Runaway slaves, persecuted religious sects, fugitives, displaced peasants, and rebels.  Now it is the last redoubt of the revolution.

They roam the mountains, half-starved and usually lost, ambushing Batista’s forces whenever they find them.  Barely 70 men and women, they face down an army backed by the most powerful nation in the world.  They are harried and bombed; they suffer daily tragedies.  All they have to eat are sugarcane and bananas.

But slowly, they begin to win friends.  First, the locals in the mountains, who benefit from Che’s medicine bag, join their ranks.  Then oppressed peasants in the lowlands join the cause.  Soon, whispers echo in the plazas of the cities, and the Cuban people wake up to a principle, simple and true;  El pueblo unido jamas sera vencido:  the people united will never be defeated.

In Cuba’s second city, Santigo de Cuba, Frank Pais leads an underground resistance, sabotaging supplies, publishing a revolutionary newsletter, spying on troop movements, and organizing attacks.  In Havana, the citizens rise up and attempt to storm Batista’s fortress-like Presidential palace.  It is a failure, and there follow brutal reprisals and Pais’ execution.  But this does nothing to quell the fire in the people’s bellies.  They hold on defiantly, they organize mass strikes, or they flee to the hills to join the rebels.

Castro rebuffs an attack on his base in the Sierra Maestra, and after that, the movement wins fight after fight.  The momentum is with them, and like a wave, it carries them west. Finally, Che leads a disparate band of revolutionaries to victory in the heavily fortified city of Santa Clara, putting the rebels a four-hour drive from Havana, and winning the pivotal battle of the war.

Batista and his gangster friends flee like rats abandoning a sinking ship.  But not all Cubans welcome the revolution’s victory.  Many fear what might come next, and for some, those fears will later be justified.  And so, many people, innocent and guilty alike, race to get out of the country.

In Havana, red flags and flowers blanket the street as Havana falls not to a conquering army but to a fiesta.  The Cubans have reclaimed their capital, the war is won, and the dictator is gone, but there is a still greater challenge: rebuilding this island in the name of its people.  The revolution is triumphant, but whether it can deliver on its promise of a free and equal Cuba remains to be seen.