The three guerrilla forces shared a common enemy – Batista – but little more. Disputes within the Directorio saw the formation of a splinter group, the Second Front. The rump of the Directorate fled to the Escambray mountains in central Cuba and began its own guerrilla campaign, independent of Castro. Batista narrowly escaped but the Directorate’s leader, José Antonio Echeverría, was killed. A few months later, the Directorate attacked the presidential palace in Havana. In late 1956 Castro’s rag-tag band of rebels sailed to their proposed hideout, the Sierra Maestra.
At that point, the Cuban rebellion centred on urban resistance led by the Revolutionary National Action (which merged into Castro’s 26 July Movement, or M26) and the Revolutionary Directorate. Upon his release he went into exile in Mexico, where he plotted a guerrilla insurgency to be headquartered in the mountains of Eastern Province. With no electoral avenue to change the status quo, opposition groups turned to violent insurrection.Ĭastro’s revolt began on 26 July 1953 with a disastrous attack on the barracks in Santiago, the major city in Eastern Province. He cancelled elections, suppressed dissent and struck deals with the US Mafia for personal financial gain at ordinary Cubans’ expense. General Batista had been a progressive, democratically elected president in the 1940s, but returned to power in 1952 through a military coup. His task was to ensure he would be Batista’s successor. Knowing he would lose the race, Castro turned his positional weakness into a strength and embarked on an eight-day, island-long victory parade or caravana. While Castro was stuck in the south-eastern hinterland, his rivals for power – the regime’s top brass and the commanders of partially-allied guerrilla forces – were headed north-west to the capital. Batista’s flight had caught him by surprise. When the Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista fled Havana in the early hours of 1 January 1959, Fidel Castro was 550 miles away, at the opposite end of the island.
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