Cuban Revolution

The Cuban Revolution was an armed insurgency waged from 26 July 1953, when Fidel Castro led an unsuccessful attack on the Moncada Barracks, to 1 January 1959, when the government of General Fulgencio Batista collapsed and Castro's 26th of July Movement entered Havana. Batista had seized power in a 1952 coup that cut short Cuba's constitutional elections, and the movement that eventually overthrew him drew together Castro's own guerrilla column in the Sierra Maestra, urban resistance networks, and later his brother Raul Castro and the Argentine revolutionary Che Guevara. Batista fled the island on New Year's Eve 1958 as rebel forces closed on the capital, and the new government that followed set Cuba on the path to a one-party socialist state aligned with the Soviet Union, reshaping Cold War politics in the Western Hemisphere for the following three decades.