Castro Topples Batista: Cuba's Revolution Begins

Batista packed a plane and ran on New Year''s Day, 1959, taking an estimated $300 million looted from Cuba''s treasury. His army had simply stopped fighting, not because Fidel Castro''s guerrillas won a decisive pitched battle, but because the soldiers quit believing in the cause they were ordered to kill for. A dictator''s military is only as strong as its willingness to shoot, and Batista''s had evaporated. Castro''s 26th of July Movement had spent over two years in the Sierra Maestra mountains, outnumbered and outgunned, surviving on peasant support and sheer audacity. The movement took its name from a failed 1953 attack on the Moncada Barracks, an operation so disastrous that Castro was imprisoned for two years. After his release, he regrouped in Mexico, crossed to Cuba on the yacht Granma with 82 fighters, and lost most of them within days of landing. The twelve survivors retreated into the mountains and rebuilt. Batista''s generals read the situation before their boss did and refused to keep fighting. When Castro finally reached Havana on January 8, he rode in on a tank while hundreds of thousands pressed against the roads. Within two years, Cuba nationalized every American-owned business on the island, from sugar refineries to the Havana Hilton, and turned to Moscow for economic and military support. The Bay of Pigs invasion followed in April 1961. The Cuban Missile Crisis came eighteen months later. The Cold War''s most dangerous thirteen days, when Kennedy and Khrushchev stared down nuclear annihilation, all trace their origins to one corrupt dictator deciding he would rather be rich in exile than dead in the presidential palace.