Cuban Revolution

In the first days of January 1959, a rebel movement led by Fidel Castro took power in Cuba after the dictator Fulgencio Batista fled the country. The revolution transformed a close American ally, long within the United States' sphere of influence, into a one-party socialist state aligned with the Soviet Union. Located about ninety miles from Florida, Cuba became a central flashpoint of the Cold War in the Western Hemisphere, and its government has endured for decades.

The background lay in Cuba's political and economic situation after independence from Spain in 1898. The United States had intervened repeatedly, and under the Platt Amendment it held a legal right to do so until 1934. American companies owned large shares of Cuba's sugar, utilities and other industries. Batista, a former sergeant who had risen to power in the 1930s, returned in a 1952 coup that cancelled scheduled elections. His government was repressive and widely accused of corruption, though Cuba also had a relatively urbanized population and a sizable middle class by Latin American standards, with deep inequality between city and countryside.

Castro, a young lawyer, led a failed attack on the Moncada barracks in July 1953 and was imprisoned, then released in an amnesty. After exile in Mexico, he returned to Cuba in late 1956 aboard the yacht Granma with a small band of fighters, including his brother Raúl and the Argentine doctor Ernesto "Che" Guevara. Survivors regrouped in the Sierra Maestra mountains and waged guerrilla war. Urban resistance groups, student organizations and other opponents of Batista also played major roles, and the regime lost support as it used censorship and violence. The United States halted arms sales to Batista in 1958. After rebel victories in late 1958, Batista left on the night of December 31, and Castro's forces entered Havana in early January.

Castro's early government promised reform, and it quickly carried out land redistribution, trials and executions of former officials, and nationalization of foreign-owned property. Relations with Washington deteriorated and Cuba drew closer to the Soviet Union. Historians still debate whether Castro was a committed Marxist-Leninist from the start or moved in that direction under pressure; he declared the revolution socialist in 1961 and later openly embraced communism.

The consequences were far-reaching. Hundreds of thousands of Cubans emigrated, many to Florida. The United States sponsored the failed Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961, imposed an economic embargo, and the island was at the center of the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962, when the superpowers came close to nuclear war. Cuba backed revolutionary movements abroad and sent troops to Africa. At home, the government expanded literacy and health care while restricting political freedom and dissent. The revolution remains both an inspiration and a cautionary tale, depending on who tells it.