Batista's Cuba and the Making of a Revolutionary: Moncada to the Sierra Maestra

Fulgencio Batista had governed Cuba directly or indirectly since 1933, seizing full power outright in a 1952 coup that cancelled that year's scheduled elections. His government cultivated close ties with the United States in the sugar and tourism sectors, tolerated Havana's flourishing casino and organized-crime economy, and combined pervasive corruption with the repression of opponents, even as land ownership remained heavily concentrated in vast sugar latifundios and rural Cuba lagged far behind Havana's prosperity. Fidel Castro, a young lawyer who had been an Ortodoxo Party candidate for Congress before the coup, organized an armed group in response, and on July 26, 1953, led roughly 160 combatants in an assault on the Moncada Barracks in Santiago de Cuba, hoping to seize weapons and spark a national uprising.