Batista fell on New Year's Eve to Sierra Maestra rebels
The Cuban Revolution toppled Fulgencio Batista's 1952–1959 dictatorship after legal challenges failed and armed struggle began. Fidel Castro's 26th of July Movement regrouped in the Sierra Maestra after the Granma landing, entering Havana as Batista fled on 31 December 1958.
Batista seized power in a 1952 coup that cut short Cuba's young democracy. One of those who opposed him was Fidel Castro, then a young lawyer. After a failed armed attack, Castro and his comrades were jailed and formed the 26th of July Movement in prison; his two-hour courtroom speech listing the regime's abuses made him famous nationwide. Hoping to look magnanimous, Batista later amnestied the survivors. When the Castros, Che Guevara and others returned aboard the boat Granma, troops met them with gunfire, and the rebels retreated into the Sierra Maestra mountains to regroup, recruit and sabotage.
On paper 1950s Cuba looked prosperous, ranking near the top of Latin America for life expectancy, income per head and ownership of household appliances. Beneath those averages lay slow growth, heavy dependence on sugar and on American trade quotas and investment, and capital leaking abroad instead of building local industry. Havana was among the world's costliest cities, boasting in 1954 the most Cadillacs per person anywhere, while prices tracked the United States without its wages or social programmes.
The countryside told a different story. Only 15 percent of rural people had running water, and the eastern province of Oriente had one doctor per 2,423 residents against one per 227 in Havana. The capital, on half a percent of the land with a fifth of the population, used 70 percent of the electricity. Nearly a third of workers lacked full-time jobs, about 475,000 sugar workers averaged roughly a hundred days of work a year, and between 1955 and 1958 industry created only 8,000 jobs for some 150,000 new male workers. Batista meanwhile courted casino money, bringing in the mobster Meyer Lansky to expand Havana's gambling business.
The rebels drove Batista out on the last day of 1958, and the 26th of July Movement became the de facto government, with Castro its dominant figure. Relations with the United States were badly damaged and stayed strained despite later thaws, and the revolution rippled across Latin America.
Source: Cuban Revolution
