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.
Hours of research by our editors, distilled into minutes of clarity.
Imagine you’re 15 years old and a man on a bicycle hands you a telegram. It says to go to the airport at dawn, with no luggage. There’s no time to say goodbye to your parents, and no guarantee you’ll ever see them again. That was a typical story for the 14,000 unaccompanied minors secretly ferried out of Castro’s Cuba and into the US as part of the covert Operation Pedro Pan.
In light of the failed attempt of a CIA-sponsored takeover of Cuba by a group of Cuban exiles, the newfound communist regime under Fidel Castro sought help from the like-minded Soviet Union. The Soviets built nuclear missiles on the island 90 miles to the south of the US to defend Cuba from attack, a move which brought the world the closest ever to nuclear catastrophe. Learn the tense history with this short video.
While the mid-century revolution and the Cuban missile crisis typically earn the most attention in US-Cuban studies, their history goes back 150 years amid slavery debates and sugar plantations. Prior to the revolution, the US vacillated between imperial control and neutral indifference toward their southern neighbor, policies which forever shaped the Caribbean island's history. Watch a brief overview here.
It’s one thing to read about historical events in textbooks; it’s another to hear what the experience was like from someone who lived it. In this moving StoryCorps piece, a doctor talks with his daughter about his decision to flee with his family in 1963, and how he went from treating patients in Cuba to picking tomatoes and cleaning motels while finding his footing in a new country.
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.
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.
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.
Fidel Castro was popular among the people of Cuba when he overthrew the Batista regime in 1959, but not everybody wanted to stick around to be part of his revolution. Nearly 2 million Cubans fled the island after Castro took over, with most of them winding up in the US. In this explainer, find out where else they landed, and what migration flows have looked like in the decades since.
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.
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.
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