Leader of the hemisphere's first socialist revolution: forty-seven years against imperialism
“History will absolve me.” — courtroom speech after Moncada, 1953
Leader of Latin America's first successful socialist revolution. He opened the struggle against the Batista dictatorship with the 1953 Moncada attack, seized power through guerrilla war in 1959, and defended socialist Cuba for forty-seven years against US blockade and pressure.
Career Timeline
- 1953The Moncada attack — 'History will absolve me'
- 1954Clandestinely published his courtroom defense as History Will Absolve Me
- 1956–1959Lands from the Granma; guerrilla war in the Sierra Maestra
- 1959Overthrows Batista; the revolutionary government
- 1961–1962Repels the Bay of Pigs invasion; the Missile Crisis
- 1976–2008President of the Council of State
- 2008–2016Hands power to Raúl; dies in 2016
Related historical events
26 July 1953: Dawn at the Moncada Barracks
At dawn on 26 July 1953, the twenty-six-year-old lawyer Fidel Castro led about a hundred young rebels in an assault on the Moncada barracks in Santiago de Cuba. It was meant to signal an uprising against Batista's coup regime, but the attack failed, and many of the captured comrades were tortured and killed. In court on 16 October that year, Castro delivered the long speech in his own defence that ended: condemn me, it does not matter, history will absolve me.
Released in the amnesty of 1955, he went to Mexico, organized the 26th of July Movement, and there met Che Guevara. On 2 December 1956, eighty-two men landed in Cuba from the yacht Granma. Surviving near annihilation after the landing, the guerrilla force took root in the Sierra Maestra, grew with peasant support, and within two years broke Batista's army.
On 1 January 1959 Batista fled the country, and on 8 January Castro entered Havana. A popular revolution had triumphed on an island long treated as the backyard of the United States.
1961: The Year of the Bay of Pigs and the Literacy Campaign
In April 1961 a US-organized exile force landed at Playa Girón, on the Bay of Pigs. The invasion was crushed within three days, with Castro directing the defence at the front. On the eve of the invasion, in the funeral oration for the victims of the preparatory air raids, he proclaimed for the first time the socialist character of the revolution. Over the following half century Cuba withstood the US embargo and hundreds of assassination plots without collapsing.
That same year Cuba mounted a mobilization of another kind. More than a hundred thousand young teachers and students went into the countryside with lanterns to teach reading, and in December 1961 Cuba declared itself a territory free of illiteracy. The campaign, verified on the ground by UNESCO, became the foundation of a system of free health care and education; Cuban infant mortality and life expectancy came to stand alongside those of far richer countries.
Castro's internationalism was more than rhetoric. Cuban doctors were dispatched to disasters and epidemics around the world, and from 1975 Cuban troops in Angola played a decisive part in halting the invasions of apartheid South Africa's army. After his release, Mandela travelled to Cuba to give thanks. Not even the extreme crisis of the post-Soviet Special Period broke the revolution. Castro died on 25 November 2016, at the age of ninety.