Cuba - Lonely Planet [19]
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The famous photo of Che Guevara that adorns thousands of T-shirts worldwide was taken by Alberto Korda in March 1960 at the funeral of the victims of El Coubre, a French ship purportedly blown up by the CIA in Havana harbor.
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Elsewhere passions were running equally high and in September 1957 naval officers in the normally tranquil city of Cienfuegos staged an armed revolt and set about distributing weapons among the disaffected populace. After some bitter door-to-door fighting, the insurrection was brutally crushed and the ringleaders rounded up and killed, but for the revolutionaries the point had been made. Batista’s days were numbered.
Back in the Sierra Maestra, Fidel’s rebels overwhelmed 53 Batista soldiers at an army post in El Uvero in May and captured more badly needed supplies. The movement seemed to be gaining momentum and despite losing respected underground leader Frank País to a government assassination squad in Santiago de Cuba in July, support and sympathy around the country was starting to mushroom. By the beginning of 1958 Castro had established a fixed headquarters at La Plata, in a cloud forest high up in the Sierra Maestra, and was broadcasting propaganda messages from Radio Rebelde (710AM and 96.7FM) all across Cuba. The tide was starting to turn.
Sensing his popularity waning, Batista sent an army of 10,000 men into the Sierra Maestra in May 1958 on a mission known as Plan FF (Fin de Fidel or End of Fidel). The intention was to liquidate Castro and his merry band of loyal guerrillas who had now burgeoned into a solid fighting force of 300 men. Outnumbered 30 to one and fighting desperately for their lives, the offensive became something of a turning point as the rebels – with the help of the local campesinos (country people) – gradually halted the onslaught of Batista’s young and ill-disciplined conscript army. With the Americans increasingly embarrassed by the no-holds-barred terror tactics of their one-time Cuban ally, Castro sensed an opportunity to turn defensive into offensive and signed the groundbreaking Caracas Pact with eight leading opposition groups calling on the US to stop all aid to Batista. Che Guevara and Camilo Cienfuegos were promptly dispatched off to the Escambray Mountains to open up new fronts in the west and by December, with Cienfuegos holding down troops in Yaguajay (the garrison finally surrendered after an 11-day siege) and Guevara closing in on Santa Clara, the end was in sight. It was left to Che Guevara to seal the final victory, employing classic guerrilla tactics to derail an armored train in Santa Clara and split the country’s battered communications system in two. By New Year’s Eve 1958, the game was up: a sense of jubilation filled the country, and Che and Camilo were on their way to Havana unopposed.
In the small hours of January 1, 1959 Batista fled by private plane to the Dominican Republic. Meanwhile, materializing in Santiago de Cuba the same day, Fidel made a rousing victory speech from the town hall in Parque Céspedes before jumping into a jeep and traveling across the breadth of the country to Havana in a Caesar-like cavalcade. The triumph of the Revolution was complete. Or was it?
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CONSOLIDATING POWER
On January 5, 1959, the Cuban presidency was assumed by Manuel Urrutia, a judge who had defended the M-26-7 prisoners during the 1953 Moncada trials, though the leadership and real power remained unquestionably with Fidel. Riding on the crest of a popular wave the self-styled Líder Máximo began to mete out revolutionary justice with an iron fist and within a matter of weeks hundreds of Batista’s supporters and military henchmen had been rounded up and executed inside the walls of La Cabaña fort (Click here). Already suspicious