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.
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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.
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.
Alberto Korda wasn’t even there to photograph Che: the newspaper photographer had his Leica trained on Fidel Castro when Che briefly emerged from behind the podium just long enough for Korda to snap that legendary photo. This longread details how Korda’s image has since become a strange capitalist knickknack, appearing everywhere from the cover of a Madonna album to Jean-Paul Gaultier’s sunglasses.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
Legend has it the CIA tried (and failed) to assassinate Fidel Castro more than 600 times over the course of his long life. You’ve probably heard the one about the exploding cigar, or when the agency sent a box of Fidel’s favorite Cohibas laced with a deadly dose of botulinum toxin (Botox). But did you know about the infected scuba suit, or how they tried to dose his TV studio with LSD?
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.
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