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In 1952 Fulgencio Batista seized Cuba in a military coup, and young lawyer Fidel Castro sued the regime for tyranny; the courts ruled the coup had overturned the constitution. Havana had one of the world’s highest per capita rates of Cadillac ownership in 1954 and mob-linked casinos tied to figures like Meyer Lansky, boosted by 1952 hotel laws, while about 475,000 sugar workers had jobs only 100 days a year. Castro formed The Movement, recruited around 1,200 followers, and on July 26, 1953 led more than 126 fighters against the Moncada Barracks in Santiago de Cuba. A chance patrol, jammed weapons and heavy fortifications ended the attack in about an hour, and his second-in-command Abel Santamaría was tortured and killed.

Castro turned his trial into a two-hour indictment of the regime, rebuilt the speech from memory in prison, and smuggled it out in lemon juice inside matchboxes and laundry as History Will Absolve Me. Amnestied in 1955, he went to Mexico, met Che Guevara and trained under Spanish Civil War veteran Alberto Bayo. In 1956 the yacht Granma carried 82 men into an ambush, and the survivors reached the Sierra Maestra, sustained by Celia Sánchez’s supply network and the Mariana Grajales women’s squad. In 1958 Batista’s Operation Verano sent about 12,000 troops against roughly 300 rebels and failed, and Batista fled on New Year’s Eve 1958.

• Rural Oriente had one doctor per 2,423 people, against one per 227 in Havana.
• Only 15 percent of rural residents had running water.
• At Las Mercedes, Castro requested a ceasefire and used six days of talks to slip his encircled force away.
• Rebels paid peasants for livestock and brought medics and literacy schools to the mountains.
• By 1965 the 26th of July Movement had become the Communist Party of Cuba.