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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
How will history remember Che Guevara? As a freedom fighter who heroically defended poor people, or as a murderous warlord? This animated educational video presents both sides of the argument in a mock courtroom setting while narrating the events of Che’s (brief) life, then lets the viewer be the judge.
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.
Even the objects of everyday life were politicized under socialism. This catalog of 262 Cuban artifacts, collected between 1959 and the fall of the Soviet Union, reveals how revolutionary values found their way into the most ordinary of items—from cocktail coasters to cologne.
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.
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