Brothers in arms, Fidel and Raul Castro, set Cuba’s communist path
A 2000km boat trip from Mexico in 1956 secured Cuban power for Fidel and Raul Castro.
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JUST after midnight on November 25, 1956, a band of bearded, khaki-clad revolutionaries boarded a small, overloaded cabin cruiser to sail from the Mexican port city of Tuxpan.
Designed for 25 passengers at most, and loaded with extra fuel for a planned five-day voyage, that night future Cuban dictator Fidel Castro, his younger brother Raul and Argentinian supporter Ernesto “Che” Guevera led 79 passengers onto the 18m Granma craft.
“It was 1am, November 25, 1956, and time to leave,” Faustino Perez noted in Diary of the Cuban Revolution. “As quietly as possible, with only one engine going at low speed and all her lights out, the Granma began to pull away. We were crouched so close together that we were almost on top of one another.”
As the craft ploughed across the Gulf Of Mexico, in Havana Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista, target of the Castros’ 26th of July Movement, was rubberstamping US Mafia boss Meyer Lansky’s 21-floor casino resort, the Hotel Havana Riviera overlooking the city’s Verdado waterfront.
The Castro brothers, whose official 59-year rule of the Caribbean island nation comes to end as Raul steps aside as president, had spent 18 months in exile in Mexico after the failure of their first attempt to topple Batista.
Raul was 22 when he joined Fidel’s first armed insurrection, an attack on Moncada army barracks in Santiago de Cuba on July 26, 1953, challenging the US-backed Batista regimen. Then a lawyer in Havana, Fidel organised the attack from a support base of about 150 farm and factory workers, after he had nominated as a candidate in a free election cancelled by Batista in 1952.
Fidel, born in 1926, and Raul, born in 1931, were sons of Angel Castro, a Spanish immigrant turned wealthy landowner, with Lina Ruiz, his wife’s housekeeper. From Belen Jesuit Preparatory School they went to the University of Havana. Fidel later admitted his father was corrupt, and also hated Americans for sidelining Cuba’s independence movement in 1898, and distrusted the extravagance of American-style capitalism.
As a social science student, Raul joined the Socialist Youth, an affiliate of the Soviet-orientated Cuban Communist Party, and with Fidel joined sometimes violent student actions.
When Fidel led 100 supporters to attack Moncada, where he planned to deliver a manifesto promising democracy and social justice, Raul and engineering student Lester Rordriguez stormed Santiago de Cuba’s Palace of Justice. When the 1953 Moncada attack failed, the Castros and supporters fled but within days police and Batista’s army captured about 80. Castro claimed nine died in the fighting, and another 56 were later executed, including Fidel’s second-in-command Abel Santamaria, who was imprisoned, tortured, and executed on the day of the attack.
At his trial Fidel spoke for nearly four hours, concluding with: “Condemn me, it does not matter. History will absolve me.” Fidel was sentenced to 15 years in Presidio Modelo prison, on Isla de Pinos, and Raul to 13 years. Relenting to political pressure, in 1955 Batista released all Cuban political prisoners. The Castros joined exiles in Mexico to prepare to overthrow Batista, training under Alberto Bayo, a Spanish Civil War Republican forces leader. In June 1955 Raul also introduced Fidel to Che Guevara, who joined their movement.
Former Cuban president Carlos Prio Socarras, deposed in Batista’s 1952 military coup and living in exile in Florida, helped raise $US15,000 to buy a vessel to return revolutionaries to Cuba. The Castros planned to arrive at Niquero, 2000km away, following the route used by earlier independence fighter Jose Marti, who began Cuba’s War of Independence in 1895.
Granma skipper Norbeto Collado Abreu had been captured at Moncada and tortured, hung “by my testicles and left unconscious”. He regained consciousness at a hospital, where July 26th Movement supporter Concha Chada cared for him and arranged his passage to Mexico in January 1956.
“I met Fidel and began training, without knowing what type of mission it would be, from January to November 1956,” Abreu said. The Granma was to arrive on November 30, when 26th of July followers in Santiago de Cuba would rise up to greet the rebels. The Granma finally hit a sandbar in daylight on December 2, and suffered many casualties under a Cuban air force attack. The landing party split and wandered lost for two days, most of their supplies abandoned. Betrayed by a peasant guide, several more died in an ambush, when Batista mistakenly announced Fidel’s death. Only 12 Granma sailors eventually regrouped in the Sierra Maestra mountain range, where they set up camps as Civic Resistance groups assembled in Cuban cities, drawing middle-class and professional citizens to Castro’s movement.
As hostilities in the Cuban Revolution continued, in December 1957 actor Ginger Rogers performed at the opening of The Havana Riviera Hotel.
On New Year’s Eve, 1958, as Castro forces marched into Havana, Batista fled Cuba for Dominican Republic.
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