Cuban Revolution

When word got out that Fulgencio Batista had fled the country on New Year’s Eve, photographer Burt Glinn got on the first plane out of Miami, without even waiting for an assignment from a newspaper. But the photographs he captured on arrival in Havana made history. From commandeered tanks rolling through the streets of Old Havana to triumphant guerillas reuniting with their tearful mothers, the images capture the jubilation and confusion of a country on the verge of the unknown.

Fidel Castro's regime has lasted almost seven decades. That story began on Dec. 2, 1956, with the landing of a small yacht—dubbed the Granma—with 82 soldiers and Castro himself, as his onshore allies attacked military and government installations in advance of their arrival.

How did a dozen revolutionaries take down one of the 20th century’s most power-hungry autocrats? One important turning point came in the fall of 1958 when Castro’s rebels captured a train car full of ammo on its way to resupply the under-equipped troops at one of Fulgencio Batista’s last military strongholds, Santa Clara. This “anticolonial” timeline makes sense of the revolution, from what catalyzed it to its legacy in the present day.

In 1960, State Department official Lester Mallory wrote a secret memo outlining in the bluntest terms a rationale for imposing trade restrictions on Cuba. An embargo was “the only foreseeable means” of getting rid of Castro, he wrote. Its goal? “To decrease wages, to bring about hunger, desperation, and the overthrow of [the] government.” This archive brings together bushels of declassified US government documents relating to the embargo, and others obtained through the Freedom of Information Act.

What was Cuba like before Castro? The answer depends on who you ask. Exiles who fled at the start of the Revolution often speak so nostalgically about the “Cuba of before,” you might think the streets were paved with gold. Castro supporters, meanwhile, have argued that the country was “the brothel of the Western Hemisphere” before socialism came to the island. This article offers a more balanced picture of life before Castro, for better or for worse.

The most consequential effect of the Cuban Revolution was its role in bringing the US and Russia to the brink of nuclear war. To many, those 13 days in October 1962, felt like they lasted 13 years. This interactive site from the JFK Library tells the story of those tense days in documents, photographs, and audio recordings of conversations between Kennedy and figures such as Dwitght D. Eisenhower, J. Edgar Hoover, and Howard Macmillan.

In April 1961, a group of Cuban exiles invaded the island's southern Bay of Pigs to overthrow the communist, Soviet-aligned government of Fidel Castro (who had taken over the previous year). The CIA under US President John F. Kennedy secretly supported the operation, seeking a more democratic and friendly ally to the south. Learn why the operation failed miserably and became the US' most spectacular foreign policy failure of the 20th century.

Most people in Cuba before the revolution lived in simple wooden homes in the rural countryside, farming tobacco, sugarcane, and coffee. Photographer Orpha Leatherman captured life in rural Cuba in this set of photos.

From 1953 to 1959, a small band of revolutionaries led by Fidel Castro and Ernesto “Che” Guevara overthrew the Batista dictatorship in Cuba and established a socialist state in its place, the first in the Western Hemisphere. The Cuban Revolution upended not only the island’s political, social, cultural, and economic systems but also global geopolitics, profoundly affecting Cuba’s relationship with its largest neighbor, the United States.

Only 90 miles of warm Caribbean water separates Cuba’s white-sand beaches from American soil. But for over 50 years, relations between the two countries became so icy the chasm seemed unbridgeable. This timeline covers key events in the six-decade relationship, including the 1962 embargo imposed by JFK that would cost Cuba more than $130B.