Page 298 - Encyclopedia Of World History Vol IV

revolution—cuba 1599

in the work of the cooperative may be admitted as
members. Applications for membership must be vol-
untary and approved by a general meeting of mem- limited. Following Fulgencio Batista’s coup d’état of 10
bers’ delegates. March 1952, Fidel Castro emerged as one of the leaders of
The cooperative shall make every effort to take in the opposition to the dictatorship. His status was con-
as members the dependents of revolutionary martyrs, firmed by the disastrous attack he led on the Moncada Bar-
of soldiers and government workers, and disabled as racks on 26 July 1953.The romantic failure of this attempt
well as demobilized servicemen (including the mili- and his subsequent trial (during which he made his famous
tary personnel who came over from the Kuomintang speech,“History Will Absolve Me”) made the twenty-seven-
armed forces and those who accepted the peaceful lib- year-old Castro a political star. Following his pardon and
eration of the regions under their control but who subsequent exile, Castro organized a group of men
have since been demobilized and returned to the (Movimiento 26 de Julio) to lead a guerrilla war on the
countryside). The aged, the weak, the orphaned, the island. The group (including his brother Raul and
widowed and the disabled should also be admitted as the Argentine Ernesto “Che” Guevara) was practically
members. New settlers should also be drawn into the destroyed by regime forces upon landing.Thanks to a great
cooperative. deal of luck, some favorable media coverage, Castro’s con-
Source: Geddes,W. R. (1963). Peasant Life in Communist China: Monograph #6 (p. 56). siderable charisma, and the ineptness of the dictatorship’s
Ithaca, NY: Society for Applied Anthropology.
army and police, the small band was able to survive 1957
in the Sierra Maestra mountain range in Cuba.
Beginning in 1958, the rebel army began more ambi-
Further Reading
tious, but still quite limited, military offensives culminat-
Bergere, M. (1998). Sun Yat-sen. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Cheek,T. (Ed.). (2002). Mao Zedong and China’s revolutions. New York: ing in the battle of Santa Clara of 17 December 1958.
Palgrave. Partly due to the appeal of the rebels and the venality and
Dirlik, A. (1989). The origins of Chinese Communism. New York: Oxford
University Press. atrocities of the regime, popular sentiment and even that
Fairbank, J., & Twitchett, D. (Eds.). (1983). The Cambridge history of of the American embassy had overwhelmingly gone
China. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. against Batista by midyear. On New Year’s Eve Batista
Fitzgerald, J. (1996). Awakening China: Politics, culture, and class in the
nationalist revolution. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. resigned and the government fell into Castro’s lap. From
Joseph, W. (Ed.). (1991). New perspectives on the Cultural Revolution. the beginning, the limited nature of the conflict produced
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
debates on the relative contribution made by the rebels
in the sierra and more middle-class opponents in the city
or llano.(Despite later attempts to emphasize its role,
labor was either a fairly passive actor or actually on
Revolution—Cuba Batista’s side.) Due to later ideological splits this histo-
riographical debate came to be imbued with considerable
he term Cuban revolution has really two meanings. fervor and importance. Despite these arguments, the
TThe first refers to the actual military campaign that important lesson to be taken from this first part of the
began in December 1956 with the landing by Fidel Cas- Cuban revolution was that authoritarian regimes such as
tro and close to one hundred men in Oriente Province Batista’s were not so much defeated as they collapsed
and triumphed in January 1959 with the victory of the from their own contradictions and inadequacies. A sim-
rebel army. The second Cuban revolution began imme- ilar pattern would follow in Nicaragua and Iran in 1979.
diately after Fidel Castro’s entry into Havana and at least
officially continues to this day (December 2003). The Second Revolution
Despite its retroactive symbolic and political impor- The second stage of the Cuban revolution began with the
tance, the actual military struggle of the 1950s was quite traditional dynamics of postrevolutionary politics: the