In 1956 we will be free or we will be martyrs.
FIDEL CASTRO
In the early hours of Sunday 25 November 1956 a creaking twin-engined leisure yacht set sail from Tuxpan, on Mexico’s eastern shore, headed for Cuba. At fifty-eight feet long and with limited deck space, a modest lounge area and just four small cabins, the Granma was designed to accommodate fewer than two dozen people. Packed aboard the boat that night, however, were eighty-two men, all members of the 26th of July Movement (M-26-7), a vanguard organisation committed to ending the rule of President Fulgencio Batista, Cuba’s American-backed strongman. Their leader was Fidel Castro, an enigmatic thirty-year-old lawyer and professional revolutionary, who had paid $15,000 for the vessel. The compañeros counted Fidel’s younger brother, Raúl, and a young Argentine doctor, Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara, among their number. Squeezed in among them was a substantial arsenal (two anti-tank guns, three Thompson machine guns, ninety rifles, more than three dozen pistols and ammunition), a small quantity of food and medical supplies, and some two thousand gallons of fuel stored in metal cans on deck.1
Just a few days earlier Mexican police had seized a cache of weapons and arrested several of the movement’s activists during a raid on a rebel safe house in a well-heeled neighbourhood of the capital. Meanwhile severe storm warnings had led the local authorities to issue an order prohibiting all sea travel. With the police closing in and local officials on high alert, the Granma’s crew were keen to depart as quietly as possible. As she slipped away from her moorings, all the lights on board were turned out and the yacht was powered by just one engine, running at low speed. The young revolutionaries – ‘crouched so closely together’ that they were ‘almost on top of each other’ – held their breath as the boat made its way down the river and then across the harbour before reaching the Gulf of Mexico. Once they entered the open water, though, they permitted themselves a moment of emotional release. ‘As one’ they stood to sing first the Cuban national anthem and then the rousing 26 July hymn; its lines ‘May Cuba reward our heroism, for we are soldiers who are going to free the Motherland’ must have seemed especially poignant.2
The optimism was soon dampened as a combination of rough seas, strong winds and the poor state of the Granma threatened disaster. Almost the entire crew was afflicted by dreadful seasickness. As Che later explained, the ‘whole boat assumed a ridiculous, tragic appearance’ as, after a desperate and ultimately futile search for antihistamines, men clutched their stomachs or placed their heads in buckets, with others lying ‘immobile’ and ‘in strange positions’ on the deck, their ‘clothes covered in vomit’.3
The boat also came perilously close to sinking. One comrade described how, as ‘mountainous waves toyed with the small yacht’, she began to ship water at an alarming rate. With the bilge pumps seemingly ineffective, the compañeros were forced to bail out the stricken craft. Moreover, the inclement weather and the wretched state of the boat’s badly worn gears meant that the journey itself was painfully slow.4 The original plan had been to land at Niquero, in the south-east of the island, on 30 November to coincide with a planned uprising in the nearby city of Santiago de Cuba. But they were hopelessly behind schedule and, with the ship’s radio only able to receive messages, Castro’s band of rebels could only sit and listen helplessly as a bulletin brought news that the revolution had begun without them. Cuba’s second city had, in fact, awoken that morning ‘under heavy fire’ as up to three hundred activists launched their attack with ‘weapons of every calibre . . . spitting fire and lead’. Under the direction of the youthful Frank País, and wearing their trademark drab olive-green fatigues and distinctive red-and-black armbands, they chanted, ‘Down with Batista!’ and ‘Long live the revolution!’ as they launched a series of attacks. The police station, the customs house and other public buildings came under fire, and, for a while, amidst widespread panic, the rebels were able to roam the city streets freely. It took several days and the arrival of 280 elite troops, airlifted in under the command of a senior military hardliner, to restore order. By then, the Granma had finally arrived on the island – although, in the words of one compañero, ‘It wasn’t a landing, it was a shipwreck.’5
The Granma eventually hit the Cuban coast as the first glimmers of dawn began to break on 2 December. With supplies of water, food and – critically – fuel almost exhausted, the situation aboard had become increasingly desperate. The rebels’ predicament was not helped when, just hours before landing, Roberto Roque, a former naval lieutenant and the Granma’s second in command, lost his footing and plunged into the murky ocean. He was only saved when Fidel Castro ordered that the ship’s searchlight be switched on – a risky act that might well have alerted the Cuban military to their presence. Rather than landing at Niquero, where allies were waiting with supplies and trucks, the Granma ran aground about a hundred yards from Playa de los Colorados, more than ten miles south of the agreed rendezvous. They could hardly have picked a worse spot. Forced to abandon most of their equipment, the compañeros – proudly wearing their new uniforms and boots and carrying rifles, knapsacks, cartridge belts and flasks – waded ashore through muddy salt water, only to find themselves faced with seemingly endless mangrove swamps where the ‘thick, jumbled net’ proved ‘hard to penetrate’. It was, confessed Raúl Castro, ‘Hell’. They struggled on for several hours before finally reaching dry land, exhausted, hungry and caked in mud. ‘Everything’, explained Fidel’s confidant Faustino Pérez, ‘had gone awry.’6
The rebels’ only hope now was to reach the Sierra Maestra mountain range to the east, whose high peaks offered relative sanctuary and a chance to regroup. And so the ragged band of revolutionaries pushed on – often marching at night to avoid the attention of spotter planes, sucking on sugar cane for sustenance and, occasionally, receiving help from local peasant families. But, as Che put it, these were truly ‘terrible days’. Malnourished, desperately thirsty and suffering from fungal infections and painful, open blisters, they were ‘an army of shadows, ghosts’. By the morning of 5 December the party was on the verge of total collapse – some men were fainting, while others begged desperately for rest. There was no choice but to stop. They had reached a placed called Alegría de Pío (‘Joy of the Pious’), nothing more than a ‘small grove of trees, bordering a sugarcane field on one side and open to some valleys on the other, with dense woods starting farther back’.7 Most of the men stretched out and slept.
Later that afternoon Che was leaning against a tree, chatting to a comrade and munching on a couple of crackers and half a sausage, when the first shot rang out. Betrayed by a guide who had left the camp earlier in the day, the compañeros found themselves under attack from Batista’s troops. As fighter jets swooped low over the woods, strafing the rebel position, an infantry unit opened fire. In the confusion, several revolutionaries were killed and others scrabbled desperately for cover. Wounded in the neck, Che returned fire with his rifle before dragging himself into the relative safety of an adjoining field. Just ten days after leaving Mexico, Castro’s ‘army’ had been routed. His movement’s boast that it would launch a revolution to overthrow the ‘corrupt and criminal dictatorship’ seemed utterly fantastical.8
Cuba, the biggest island in the Antilles, is an enchanting place of exceptional beauty but also, some say, one that labours under a curse. Although it had achieved nominal independence in 1898 after American forces ‘liberated’ the country from Spanish rule, the island had been run as a virtual colony of the United States for much of the subsequent half-century. Up until 1934 the US government reserved the legal right to interfere in Cuba’s domestic affairs in the event of a breakdown in law and order or a threat to property rights. The United States also restricted Cuba’s ability to make foreign policy and insisted on the right to maintain military bases on the island, including a major naval facility at Guantánamo Bay.9 Even after relinquishing some of these formal powers, Uncle Sam continued to exercise a profound – some would say profoundly distorting – influence over the island’s economy and political culture.10
On the surface, Cuba in the mid-1950s was actually doing rather well, thanks in large part to the post-war American economic boom. The price of sugar, Cuba’s main export, had remained stable (it would rise significantly after the Suez Crisis) and crop yields had begun to increase, while a substantial growth in tourism from the United States had seen the construction of numerous hotels, casinos and clubs. Meanwhile Cuba’s per capita income, literacy rates and life expectancy ranked among the highest in Latin America. But beneath this veneer of success lay some deep-seated problems. Cuba’s economy was heavily over-reliant on sugar. It constituted 50 per cent of the island’s agricultural production and 80 per cent of its exports (half its sugar was sold to the USA), employed almost a quarter of the workforce and accounted for about 30 per cent of GDP. US economic interests, worth some $1 billion (mostly in banking, utilities, mining, tourism and agriculture), also meant that much of the island’s wealth was in the hands of foreign investors. Cuba’s society, with its population of six million, was massively unequal. At the top were some nine hundred thousand who controlled 43 per cent of the nation’s income, lived a life of luxury in their magnificent air-conditioned villas and could enjoy regular shopping excursions to Miami. Life for those at the bottom, though, could not have been more different. One and a half million Cubans either were unemployed, worked as landless labourers or eked out a living as subsistence farmers. With just 2 per cent of the nation’s wealth between them, they often survived on a meagre diet of rice, beans and sugar-water.11
The island republic also faced some seemingly intractable political problems. Ever since independence her political institutions had been weak and there was a pervasive culture of gangsterism and corruption.12 Aside from a brief period of democratic, constitutional rule from 1940 to 1952, Cuba’s political culture was characterised by instability, intrigue and violence. The Cuban military and the interests of the United States often proved decisive when it came to the question of who was (or was not) permitted to govern. From 1934, when a self-styled ‘revolutionary’ government was overthrown by a group of Cuban army officers, through to the end of the 1950s, one man dominated Cuban politics – Fulgencio Batista.
Born in 1902, of mixed-race peasant stock, Batista joined the army as a private in 1921, following a stint as a labourer. A decade later he was appointed as a military court stenographer with the rank of sergeant and, in 1934, this ambitious opportunist rose to the very top by leading a military takeover of the government. Batista introduced a new constitution in 1940 and, four years later, stepped down from office in the aftermath of free elections in which the opposition Auténtico Party prevailed. But the ensuing eight years were extraordinarily corrupt, even when measured by the island’s own appallingly low standards. The verdict of Louis Pérez, one of Cuba’s leading historians, is unsparing: ‘Embezzlement, graft, corruption, and malfeasance of public office permeated every branch of national, provincial, and municipal government.’ In March 1952 Batista led a second coup, cancelled the scheduled elections and appointed himself president. During his first period in office he had embarked on progressive reforms, shown a willingness to co-operate with the Cuban Communist Party (the Partido Communista de Cuba, or PCC) and enjoyed a measure of public support. His second term, though, was quite different. Structural problems were ignored, corruption continued and, in the face of rising discontent, Batista turned to repression and brutality to maintain his position: the PCC was outlawed, the labour movement and civil organisations were co-opted and dissent was crushed.13 In September 1955, the New York Times lamented that Batista, drunk on the ‘heady wine of power’, had sold his political soul to the ‘devil of dictatorship’.14 In the months leading up to the Granma’s expedition Cuba had been rocked by student protests, outbreaks of violence – including an armed assault on an army barracks and the assassination of the chief of military intelligence – and the uncovering of several anti-Batista plots. But this only brought fresh waves of repression and violence from the regime. The island was, it seemed, primed for revolution.15
One of the earliest challenges to Batista’s second power-grab had actually come from none other than Fidel Castro. Born in 1926, Castro enjoyed a relatively privileged upbringing thanks to his father, Angel, a Galician immigrant, who had managed to pull himself up by his bootstraps to become a wealthy landowner. The young Fidel attended an elite high school in Havana before enrolling at the city’s university in 1945 to study law. But Castro displayed a rebellious streak from an early age – refusing to take regular baths, clashing repeatedly with his parents and teachers; aged thirteen, he had even tried to organise a strike by his father’s sugar workers. He also had a famously short temper. The university, whose magnificent buildings dominate Aróstegui Hill in the northern suburb of Vedado, provided an ideal environment for fashioning a revolutionary. According to Castro himself, he ‘never attended lectures, never opened a book except just before examinations’; instead, he immersed himself in the cut and thrust of student radicalism. At a time when factional disputes – and even elections – were often settled violently, Castro became adept in the dark arts of street politics, participating in raucous protests, a pistol seldom far from his side. In the spring of 1948 he was arrested during an investigation into the murder of a local politician, but was released without charge. Castro, a prize-winning debater, also displayed an early penchant for the long, fiery speeches for which he would later become famous – although, in these days, he sported a pencil-thin moustache rather than a beard and donned fashionable, dark-coloured suits rather than olive-green fatigues.16
Castro, who had married Mirta Díaz Balart in October 1948, joined one of Havana’s many law firms after graduating in 1950. But his first love was politics. Although he had shown some superficial interest in the ideas of Marx and Lenin, Castro was no Communist (or not yet, at least). Instead, he threw in his lot with the Ortodoxos, one of a number of left-wing parties that had sprung up in opposition to Batista. Inspired by Cuba’s long struggle for independence, Castro railed against US imperialism in Latin America, attacked corruption and demanded ‘justice for the workers and Cuban peasantry’. He was preparing to run for a seat in the lower house of Congress when Batista launched his coup and abruptly cancelled the elections. A few days later, the mercurial young lawyer distributed a manifesto denouncing this usurpation of power and calling for the restoration of the constitution. ‘To live in chains’, he declared, ‘is to live in shame!’ Sixteen months later, Castro’s reputation for impetuosity, risk-taking and action would be on full display.17
Just after dawn on 26 July 1953, Castro led a daring assault on the Moncada Army Barracks in Santiago, whose crenellated walls housed the country’s second largest military garrison. His plan was simple enough: use the element of surprise to seize the barracks, and its mighty arsenal, while most of the soldiers were still in their bunks; simultaneously, use smaller groups of fighters to occupy the Palace of Justice next door, as well as the city’s hospital and radio station; then demand a return to constitutional government while arousing ‘the people’ to join the rebellion. The plan may have been straightforward and daring, but it was also extremely foolhardy. Castro’s band of 150 or so rebels – idealistic young men who had cut their teeth in student politics, as well as labourers, farm workers and a smattering of white-collar professionals, armed mainly with rifles – were never likely to overpower a heavily armed fortress and a thousand troops. In the event, Castro’s plan unravelled almost immediately: his forces (all dressed as sergeants, in a nice send-up of Batista’s own route to the top) were spotted by an army patrol car shortly after they arrived at the barracks. Within minutes, the rebels were pinned down by gunfire. Castro recalled that ‘more than the shooting, I remember the deafening, bitter sounds of the alarm sirens that thwarted our plan’. Although he managed to escape, many of his companions were not so fortunate. More than sixty lost their lives – most of them after having been captured and then tortured. The treatment meted out by the army and security personnel was sickening: many prisoners were beaten with rifle butts, and at least three were dragged to their deaths behind a jeep. According to one widely believed story, Haydée Santamaría, one of two young women involved in the attempted putsch, was presented with an eye belonging to her brother, Abel, during her own interrogation (certainly Abel did not survive being taken prisoner). Her boyfriend, Boris de la Coloma, was also tortured to death. In the aftermath of the assault a number of civilians, wrongly suspected of involvement, were also rounded up; some were killed. Castro himself was finally caught on 1 August, while sleeping in a small hut on the outskirts of a farm; his life was spared only because the officer who captured him was, in contrast to many of his colleagues, a fundamentally decent man.18
Put on trial in the autumn, charged with organising an armed uprising against the ‘Constitutional Powers of the State’, Castro mounted his own defence. In a brilliant courtroom performance, he sought to expose the ‘horrible, repulsive crimes’ that the Batista regime had inflicted on the prisoners and to ‘show the nation and the world the infinite misfortune of the Cuban people’, who were, he said, ‘suffering the cruelest, the most inhuman oppression of their history’. Presenting his fellow rebels as brave, patriotic heroes dedicated to the cause of freedom and justice, he condemned the president as a ‘criminal and a thief’. He concluded his lengthy speech with a defiant cry: ‘I do not fear prison, as I do not fear the fury of the miserable tyrant who took the lives of seventy of my comrades. Condemn me. It does not matter. History will absolve me.’19 It would become one of the most famous political speeches in modern history and would transform Castro into a popular revolutionary icon.
Found guilty and sentenced to fifteen years, Castro was, along with a number of his fellow rebels, incarcerated in a prison on the Isle of Pines, fifty miles south of the mainland. Here he put his time to good use: reading widely, writing numerous letters and working to shore up his nascent opposition movement (which, it was quickly decided, would be named the 26th July Movement, or M-26-7, in honour of the attack on Moncada). A number of the M-26-7 leaders tutored their comrades, holding classes in the prison library. Castro taught seminars in philosophy, world history and public speaking. In his letters, he wrote warmly of his comrades, praising their discipline and spirit and explaining proudly how, having ‘learned to handle weapons’, they were now ‘learning to wield books for the important battles of the future’. Apart from a brief period that saw their privileges suspended and Castro cast into solitary confinement, the Moncadistas were permitted to receive regular visitors and had plenty of opportunity for exercise, and even to enhance their culinary skills (steak with guava jelly, spaghetti and omelettes were some of Castro’s specialities). With a regular supply of books, food and, crucially, cigars – the floor of his cell was, Castro confessed, ‘strewn with butts’ – life could certainly have been a lot worse. In the spring of 1955 it got a great deal better. That April, in what would prove to be a catastrophic error of judgement, General Batista – basking in the glow of economic growth and American support, and increasingly complacent about his hold on power – granted an amnesty; on 15 May Fidel and Raúl Castro and eighteen other members of the 26th July Movement walked free. Within weeks, Fidel headed into exile. Insisting that the ‘hour has come to take one’s rights, not to ask for them; to seize them, not to beg for them’, he left for Mexico, declaring that ‘from such voyages, either one does not return, or one returns with the beheaded tyranny at one’s feet’.20
In mid-December 1956, nobody – except perhaps for Fidel Castro – thought that the little band of Granma rebels would prove victorious. Indeed, Castro’s attempt to launch a revolution was widely dismissed by journalists as ‘quixotic’, ‘pathetic’ and even ‘suicidal’.21 Rumours abounded that he had been killed, and the respected news bureau United Press International even reported his death as ‘fact’.22 Having noted Castro’s arrival in Cuba in its leader column on 4 December, the London Times confidently swatted aside its significance. Pointing out that Batista was a ‘veteran of many revolutions’, it predicted that ‘it is unlikely that the latest will shake his position’.23
With many of the Granma’s landing party either killed or captured and the remainder scattered, the 26 July Movement’s prospects in early December certainly looked pretty bleak. For several days, Castro himself commanded the grand total of two men. Between them they could muster just a couple of rifles and 120 rounds of ammunition, and much of their time was spent hiding in sugar cane fields. Castro recounted how they ‘threw ourselves under the leaves and straw’ as low-flying jets strafed the area with .50-calibre machine guns, causing the very ‘earth to shake’ beneath them. Determined that he would not be taken alive, Castro took to sleeping with the barrel of his rifle resting against his chin.24 Slowly, though, the twenty or so survivors of the Granma began to regroup in the foothills of the Sierra Maestra, nearing Mount Caracas, whose summit lay more than four thousand feet above sea level, by year’s end. It was from here that Castro launched a remarkable military campaign, which was to culminate in his triumphant march into Havana on 8 January 1959, following Batista’s flight nine days earlier, on New Year’s Eve.25
A hundred miles long and thirty miles across at its widest point, the Sierra Maestra, with its towering peaks, steep slopes and dense forests, made an ideal base for Castro’s rebel army. The Sierra Maestra had enjoyed a long association with ‘outlaws, squatters, and rebels’, and the writ of the government in Havana ran particularly thin in this remote region. Moreover, Castro and his forces stood an excellent chance of winning substantial support from the region’s dispossessed, marginalised and impoverished peasantry. By using guerrilla warfare – ambushing Batista’s forces in a series of hit-and-run attacks – Castro hoped to negate the huge advantages in manpower and material that the Cuban military enjoyed (at least on paper), and to inspire a mass uprising.26
Official mythology notwithstanding, the success of the Cuban revolution was not due solely to the pluck and heroism of Castro’s mountain guerrillas. In recent years, historians have emphasised the significant role played by members of the urban-based opposition movement (not all of them supporters of Castro) who engaged in sabotage and terrorism, organised strikes and provided Castro’s forces with a steady supply of arms and ammunition, medicine, food, money and other vital resources. They also distributed tens of thousands of copies of Castro’s History Will Absolve Me (the transcript of his famous four-hour trial speech) and other M-26-7 propaganda.27 Tactical alliances forged with other opposition groups, which drew in support from the churches, the labour movement, middle-class professionals and (eventually) the PCC, also proved critical.28
Castro benefited, too, from the misjudgements or misfortune of his rivals (the charismatic student leader José Antonio Echevarría, for instance, lost his life during an ill-fated attempt to seize the presidential palace in March 1957), as well as from the flaws of his enemy. While the Cuban armed forces were well armed, they were poorly trained and increasingly reluctant to fight.29 Castro’s revolutionaries also drew strength from the repressive measures unleashed by Batista’s government, which imposed press censorship, suspended constitutional guarantees (including the freedom of assembly) and engaged in abduction, torture and murder. In the immediate aftermath of the Santiago uprising, for instance, hundreds of people were thrown into prison and more than twenty young men – all opponents of the regime – disappeared. Most of these alleged ‘terrorists’ were shot through the head, but two were strung up from trees alongside a major highway, just in time for Christmas. Such savagery caused widespread outrage – the Ortodoxo Party even accused Batista of attempting to turn Cuba into ‘a Hungary of the Antilles’.30 Ultimately, such harsh measures helped to shift public support decisively behind Castro. In March 1958 the Americans, despairing at the regime’s authoritarianism, finally withdrew their own backing for Batista.31
In early December 1956, however, Castro’s apparent defeat seemed destined to serve as a minor episode in a sobering tale of how, right across the globe, the ‘old order’ was able to successfully defend its interests, outmanoeuvre its rivals and put those fighting for freedom onto the back foot. Indeed, eight thousand miles from the Sierra Maestra, in the Union of South Africa, the defenders of apartheid were preparing what they hoped would prove a decisive blow against the forces ranged against them.
The Treason Trial defendants – including Helen Joseph (2nd row, 3rd from left), Nelson Mandela (3rd row, 8th from right), Walter Sisulu (6th row, 4th from right) and Oliver Tambo (7th row, far left).
Credit: Keystone-France