Cuban Revolution

The Cuban Revolution began on 26 July 1953, when Fidel Castro led a failed attack on the Moncada army barracks in Santiago de Cuba; captured and tried, he delivered the courtroom speech History Will Absolve Me that established him as a leading opponent of President Fulgencio Batista. Released under a general amnesty in 1955, Castro organized the 26th of July Movement in exile in Mexico with his brother Raul and Ernesto Che Guevara, and the group returned to Cuba aboard the yacht Granma in December 1956 to wage a guerrilla campaign from the Sierra Maestra mountains. Batista's army collapsed under the pressure of that campaign and a growing urban underground; Batista fled the country on 1 January 1959, and Castro's forces entered Havana on 8 January 1959. The revolutionary government that followed nationalized industry and redistributed land, shifting Cuba from its earlier dependence on the United States to a new dependence on the Soviet Union.