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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
Against all odds, Fidel Castro managed to pull off a socialist revolution on the doorstep of the biggest capitalist superpower in the world, and sustain it for over six decades. This 10-part podcast takes a deep dive into the unlikely story of how the US went from supporting Fidel Castro’s revolution to (allegedly) trying to murder him more than 600 times.
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.
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.
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.
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