Cuba - Lonely Planet [331]
But as the day of attack dawned, things quickly started to go wrong. The plan’s underlying secrecy didn’t help. Meeting in a quiet rural farmhouse near the village of Siboney, many recruits arrived with no idea that they were expected to fire guns at armed soldiers and they nervously baulked. Secondly, with all but one of the Moncadistas drawn from the Havana region (the only native Santiagüero was an 18-year-old local fixer named Renato Guitart), few were familiar with Santiago’s complex street layout and, after setting out at 5am in convoy from the Siboney farm, at least two cars became temporarily lost.
The attack, when it finally began, lasted approximately 10 minutes from start to finish and was little short of a debacle. Splitting into three groups, a small contingent led by Raúl Castro took the adjacent Palacio de Justicia, another headed up by Abel Santamaría stormed a nearby military hospital, while the largest group led by Fidel attempted to enter the barracks itself.
Though the first two groups were initially successful, Fidel’s convoy, poorly disguised in stolen military uniforms, was spotted by an outlying guard patrol and only one of the cars made it into the compound before the alarm was raised.
In the ensuing chaos, five rebels were killed in an exchange of gunfire before Castro, seeing the attack was futile, beat a disorganized retreat. Raúl’s group also managed to escape, but the group in the hospital (including Abel Santamaría) were captured and later tortured and executed.
Fidel escaped briefly into the surrounding mountains and was captured a few days later; but, due to public revulsion surrounding the other brutal executions, his life was spared and the path of history radically altered.
Had it not been for the Revolution’s ultimate success, this shambolic attempt at an insurrection would have gone down in history as a military nonevent. But viewed through the prism of the 1959 Revolution, it has been depicted as the first glorious shot on the road to power.
It also provided Fidel with the political pulpit he so badly needed. ‘History will absolve me,’ he trumpeted confidently at his subsequent trial. Within six years it effectively had.
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The first barracks on this site was constructed by the Spanish in 1859, and in 1938 the present crenellated building was completed. Moncada earned immortality on the morning of July 26, 1953, when more than 100 revolutionaries led by then little known Fidel Castro stormed Batista’s troops at what was then Cuba’s second-most important military garrison (see boxed text, opposite).
After the Revolution, the barracks, like all others in Cuba, was converted into a school called Ciudad Escolar 26 de Julio, and in 1967 a museum (Map; 62-01-57; admission CUC$2, guide/camera/video CUC$1/1/5; 9am-5pm Mon-Sat, 9am-1pm Sun) was installed near gate 3, where the main attack took place. As Batista’s soldiers had cemented over the original bullet holes from the attack, the Castro government remade them (this time without guns) years later as a poignant reminder. The museum contains a scale model of the barracks plus interesting and sometimes grisly artifacts of the attack, its planning and its aftermath. It’s one of Cuba’s best.
The Parque Histórico Abel Santamaría (Map; cnr General Portuondo & Av de los Libertadores) is the site of the former Saturnino Lora Civil Hospital, stormed by Abel Santamaría and 60 others on that fateful July day. On October 16, 1953, Fidel Castro was tried in the Escuela de Enfermeras for leading the Moncada attack. It was here that he made his famous History Will Absolve Me speech. The park contains a giant cubist fountain engraved with the countenances of Abel Santamaría and José Martí that gushes out a veritable Niagara Falls of water.
The Palacio de Justicia (Map;