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with him, Sarría ruined his military career, but saved Fidel’s life. (One of Fidel’s first acts after the Revolution triumphed was to release Sarría from the prison where Batista had incarcerated him and give him a commission in the revolutionary army.) Castro’s capture soon became national news, and he was put on trial in the full glare of the media spotlight. A lawyer by profession, the loquacious Fidel defended himself in court, writing an eloquent and masterfully executed speech that he later transcribed into a comprehensive political manifesto entitled History Will Absolve Me. Basking in his newfound legitimacy and backed by a growing sense of restlessness with the old regime in the country at large, Castro was sentenced to 15 years imprisonment on Isla de Pinos (a former name for Isla de la Juventud). Cuba was well on the way to gaining a new national hero.

In February 1955 Batista won the presidency in what were widely considered to be fraudulent elections and, in an attempt to curry favor with growing internal opposition, agreed to an amnesty for all political prisoners, including Castro. Believing that Batista’s real intention was to assassinate him once out of jail, Castro fled to Mexico leaving Baptist schoolteacher Frank País in charge of a fledgling underground resistance campaign that the vengeful Moncada veterans had christened the 26th of July Movement (M-26-7). Another early M-26-7 member was Celia Sánchez Manduley, a formidable female revolutionary who later went on to become Castro’s premier confidant and muse (see boxed text,).

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Of the 12 or so men who survived the disastrous Granma landing in December 1956, only four now remain. They are Fidel Castro, Raúl Castro, Juan Almeida and Ramiro Valdés.

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Cocooned in Mexico, Fidel and his compatriots plotted and planned afresh, drawing in key new figures such as Camilo Cienfuegos and the Argentine doctor Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara, both of whom added strength and panache to the nascent army of disaffected rebel soldiers. On the run from the Mexican police and adamant to arrive in Cuba in time for an uprising that Frank País had planned for late November 1956 in Santiago de Cuba, Castro and 81 companions set sail for the island on November 25 in an old and overcrowded leisure yacht named Granma. After seven dire days at sea they arrived at Playa Las Coloradas near Niquero in Oriente on December 2 (two days late), and after a catastrophic landing – ‘it wasn’t a disembarkation; it was a shipwreck,’ a wry Guevara later commented – they were spotted and routed by Batista’s soldiers in a sugarcane field at Alegría de Pío three days later.

Of the 82 rebel soldiers who had left Mexico, only little more than a dozen managed to escape. Splitting into three tiny groups, the survivors wandered around hopelessly for days half-starved, wounded and assuming that the rest of their compatriots had been killed in the initial skirmish. ‘At one point I was Commander in Chief of myself and two other people,’ commented Fidel sagely years later (see boxed text,). However, with the help of the local peasantry, the dozen or so hapless soldiers finally managed to reassemble two weeks later in Cinco Palmas, a clearing in the shadows of the Sierra Maestra where a half-delirious Fidel gave a rousing and premature victory speech. ‘We will win this war,’ he proclaimed confidently, ‘we are just beginning the fight!’

The comeback began on January 17, 1957, when the guerrillas scored an important victory by sacking a small army outpost on the south coast called La Plata. This was followed in February by a devastating propaganda coup when Fidel persuaded New York Times journalist Herbert Matthews to come up into the Sierra Maestra to interview him. The resulting article made Castro internationally famous and gained him much sympathy among liberal Americans. Suffice to say, by this point, he wasn’t the only anti-Batista agitator. On March 13, 1957, university students led by José Antonio Echeverría attacked the Presidential Palace in Havana (now the Museo de la Revolución;