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The History Channel.
Original podcast. History This Week.
New Year's Eve. 1958.
I'm Alana Casanova -Burgis.
To put it mildly, the vibes are not good at this New Year's Eve party, which isn't normally the case.
This is Cuban President Fulgencio Batista's party, and in years past, it's been a blowout.
It's at the president's home within a military base in the capital, Havana, and some of the most powerful people in Cuba are invited.
Or at least, they're powerful for now, because this government, the rule of Fulgencio Batista, is collapsing.
Batista hasn't actually arrived at the party yet.
Not a good sign. In the meantime, some guests wander over to the buffet table, where military aides in crisp white uniforms serve a rock compoyo on fine china.
There's champagne, but most people are sticking to coffee.
They need to see where the night is going.
Rebel forces fighting against the Batista government have won battle after battle in the month of December across Cuba.
And now, Havana is in their crosshairs.
Finally, 10 minutes before midnight, a convoy of cars pulls up.
President Batista walks up the stairs to the second floor, where the party is.
The mayor of Havana, Husto Luis Pozo, turns to Senator Jorge Garcia Montes.
Don't you notice Batista is nervous, the mayor asks?
The senator replies, No, I don't see that.
Just before midnight, Batista lifts up his cup of coffee, spiked with some brandy.
Felicidades, he announces to the crowd.
The guests reply. Batista finishes his food, makes his way over to one of his majors, whispers in his ear.
The president then leaves the room, walks back down the stairs.
This is his last New Year's Eve party in Cuba.
Today, the final days of the Cuban revolution.
How did the country resist against a ruthless dictator?
And why did things finally change in December 1958?
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Professor Lillian Guerra specializes in Cuban history at the University of Florida.
Her family is Cuban, but she was raised in Marion, Kansas, a town of about 2 ,000 people.
Where being Cuban was very exotic and very unusual, and that meant that in some ways I grew up more Cuban than I would have if I had gone somewhere where I would have been surrounded by other Cubans.
It's fair to say that Guerra stuck out, but not in a way that made her feel marginalized.
People didn't want us to be anything but what we were, so we weren't being forced to assimilate.
My friends were interested in my mother's cooking, could imitate my mother speaking and yelling at me in Spanish, which she did a lot.
Guerra also maintained a direct relationship with her family still living in Cuba.
Every December, her grandparents would make the trip from the island nation to the very not island nation of Kansas.
My grandparents, especially my grandfather, he had very complex stories and memories of the political culture and life of Cuba that really had disappeared from the discourse of most Cuban exiles at the time.
It was all bad before Fidel, and you weren't really, as a child, allowed to ask questions about that.
It was all bad before Fidel, meaning the time before the Cuban Revolution and Fidel Castro's rise to power.
Before, he shifted the country towards a single -party communist state, which arguably wasn't so great either.
That's why Guerra's mother used communist as a pejorative term.
It was always, you know, a comunita.
You know, so that makes you want to understand what the hell does that mean?
This sparked a curiosity in Guerra.
Even at a young age, it pushed her to better understand both sides of this moment in time, this inflection point in December of 1958.
Fulgencio Batista seizes power six years earlier, in 1952, in a coup.
But it's actually his second coup in Cuba.
The first one came in 1933, when he takes over from Gerardo Machado, another dictator.
Batista is seen as a hope for democracy, until he, too, slips into authoritarianism.
He's ousted from power in 1944, and in the following years, Cuba is able to maintain a constitutional democracy.
We had a period from 44 to 52 that was what we could think of as the democratic experiment, where Cuba actually had a standing democracy in real elections, and Batista was very unpopular.
Batista runs for president in 1952, and while in a distant third place in the polls, stages his second coup with the backing of the military.
He announced that he was now going to rule the island, and that it was supposedly in some kind of a crisis, which it wasn't.
Batista immediately reintroduces his old ways, and undoes years of social and economic progress made under the previous democratically elected government.
Although Batista also calls his new government a, quote, disciplined democracy.
He was deeply unpopular from the moment that he took power.
He used the sel biciente liense béritar, the scene, which was an armed secret wing of the police.
In order to pursue opponents, he arrested, captured, tortured.
He created a ministry of information to censor the press.
He also established a lot of newspapers for himself that would promote himself.
Public relations are a key aspect of Batista's regime, propaganda, but not just directed towards Cubans.
He hires Edmund Chester, a former CBS executive, to promote his image in the U .S.
This is a guy who paid up to $20 ,000 or $30 ,000 a month to Chester to represent him in the United States in the media as a positive builder of a modern Cuba, when obviously he was doing the opposite.
Why was this important to direct this propaganda at America?
Julia Swig is the author of several books on Cuba's history.
Cuba's a tiny country, but it's geographically really close to the United States, and the Cuban economy at that time is dominated by sugar.
Sugar is Cuba's number one export, and its number one customer is the United States.
The economics of the relationship is one of total dependence.
Cuba is also seen as a place where communism could spread.
There was an active communist party in the country at the time.
This is during the Cold War, after all, so that has the U .S.
government nervous.
Plus, Cuba had long been a tourist destination for Americans, especially Havana, kind of a Las Vegas type of place.
The gambling, the entertainment, the tourism, the proximity, all of this gives the United States this kind of hegemonic pretense, which sounds like a pretentious phrase for, you know, the ethos of control.
So getting the U .S.
on his side is a top priority for Batista.
Plus, as an egomaniacal dictator, he just likes to be liked.
He spent a lot of money on image making, and I mean, he was a narcissist, so he saw himself as Cuba's savior from itself.
Batista is certainly not Cuba's savior.
In the world, it's not a place to build.
This resistance doesn't belong to any particular political ideology.
In fact, it might be inspired by very mainstream American politics.
The Cuban revolutionaries I know would die if they heard me say this, but I kind of see them as New Deal Democrats.
You know, in fact, Fidel Castro, he did write a letter to Franklin Roosevelt as a boy.
Fidele Castro writes this letter when he was 14, and it is not a manifesto.
He asks FDR for a $10 bill.
But as an adult, Castro, a lawyer and political rebel, makes one of the boldest moves in Cuban history.
It's July 26, 1953.
Castro is preparing an attack.
He and about 160 other rebels will strike an army barracks.
They will be outmanned and outgunned.
Their plan is not that they will win.
Their plan is to make a point.
They accomplish that mission, but at a great cost.
More than 80 of them are killed.
Many were not slaughtered in the moment.
They were captured, and then they were deeply tortured.
And Batista is proud to show this off.
Feeling that this would just fuel his propaganda machine, he invites the press to bear witness to torture and executions.
He was assuming that the journalists would report this and that people would see it and take his side, and they did the opposite.
This attack on the 26th of July, 1953, it solidifies the opposition against Batista.
And Fidel Castro renames his rebel group, the 26th of July movement.
Despite what the future would hold for Castro, this movement doesn't have a specific ideology.
They just want to see Batista go.
It would be completely ahistorical and a total contradiction of everything I've ever published to say the 26th of July movement was a communist movement.
But that doesn't stop Batista from throwing around the label.
Batista claimed that everybody who opposed him was a communist.
And that helped Fidel too, because everybody knew he wasn't.
Opposition against Batista continues to grow across Cuba over the next few years, from the 26th of July movement and many other groups.
And it's not just military action that moves the needle.
Cuba's people, everyday citizens, play a huge role.
Organizers know that winning their hearts and minds is just as important as winning firefights.
And like Batista, they become masters of the media.
The working class was very media -sobby.
Cuba was a big pioneer.
It had more television stations than any other country in Latin America.
Since Batista's invitation to reporters to bear witness to his tortures and executions, the press has become less and less afraid to censor the truth of his brutality.
Journalists took pictures of dead bodies on the streets and would just publish the picture of the dead body.
There are still fears about actively organizing opposition through the mainstream press.
Yet activists still find a way to spread the word.
The Underground had newspapers and they were small in size.
And those who distributed the newspapers were in constant danger.
They were tailed by the police.
They had to be constantly living in safe houses.
By 1958, the underground activists working in Cuba's cities have truly been forced underground.
If you were in the underground and you were really underground, it was really hard to find people who would let you stay in their house.
So you had some houses that have 40, 50 people sleeping on the floor and on the roof, you know, standing up in showers.
And yet there seems to be hope.
Earlier in 1958, 326th of July soldiers defeated a force of 10 ,000 of Batista's men.
Since then, government forces have been pushed further and further back towards Havana.
By December, there's a sense among the people that things could be on the brink of change.
The possibility of getting rid of Batista becomes palpable.
So the civilian participation in the revolutionary fervor becomes very, very widespread.
The fact that all of this momentum seems to be building in December, it's actually good timing.
December is a time in Cuba when people party a lot and people just drop by your house and it's a whole month of kind of joy.
It's the time when Lillian Guerra's grandparents would come up to visit her in Kansas years later.
It's the holidays, a month to enjoy family and friends.
But to many, that feels wrong with the state of the country the way it is.
The idea was we cannot be engaging in hedonistic pleasures when the country is suffering and Batista is committing atrocities and there are people dying.
The 26th of July movement helped set up a campaign, a boycott called Cerro Trece, Zero Three Seas, meaning we won't participate in the three seas.
Which were movies, compras, purchases and shopping and cabare, which is to go out to bars and dance clubs.
Now, it's tough to promote a widespread boycott with an authoritarian government breathing down your neck, but that's where the movement's media skills and diverse coalition of support once again come into play.
It was promoted secretly really over the radio as a shampoo.
Like a secret shampoo that had secret ingredients, but all it was was a shampoo bottle that said Cerro Trece.
Cerro Trece activists place cryptic ads in newspapers and distribute secret pamphlets to promote the campaign.
We'll put those images on our site, which you can find at the bottom of the episode description.
There is a call to patriotic duty and that call is to participate in this national strike of pleasure and of joy and the traditional Christmas.
And it works. The streets of Havana are empty.
Fulgencio Batista is panicking.
The whole landscape for Batista was intimidating and he responds to that by trying to counter the campaign with public works.
For example, Batista unveils a massive statue of Jesus Christ near a military base in the Bay of Havana and invites local priests to attend the unveiling.
And virtually no clergy show up in protest as part of the same campaign.
Like, you know, what are we celebrating here?
Cerro Trece proves to be a defining moment in this revolution.
It speaks to, you know, kind of the importance of civil society creativity and ensuring that people would see the cause of victory over Batista not as a military cause and not as a military movement, but one of morality and a moral cause.
But it is, of course, also a military movement.
Batista had been receiving weapons from the U .S.
government. But as of March 1958, not anymore.
The United States declares an arms embargo.
That's a vote of lack of confidence, clearly.
And Batista is not only fighting the rebels, he's also trying to contain dissent within his own military.
Several defeats have forced Batista's men to retreat to Cuba's major cities.
But there's just one city that the 26th of July forces believe if they capture can bring an end to this war, Santa Clara.
Because it's a very big city and it's a depot for what are the huge number of sugar cane plantations and sugar companies.
We call them sugar mills and engenios.
Remember, sugar is Cuba's number one export, the driver of its economy.
If you want to bring the Batista regime down, Santa Clara is the place to strike and December is the time to do it.
December. December is the big month, the height of the harvest season.
Che Guevara, one of Castro's top commanders, is advancing his forces towards Santa Clara, occupying town after town along the way, rallying Cubans to their cause and collecting weapons and equipment left behind by Batista's men.
By late December, Guevara's forces are outside the city.
If you can get there and paralyze the economy, take over the city, stop the trains, you are stopping the economy.
The revolution comes down to this.
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On the morning of December 27th, 1958, Professor Antonio Nunez Jimenez arrives at Che Guevara's camp, just outside the city of Santa Clara.
Jimenez is a geography professor at the city's university and has brought maps and charts to help Guevara plot his attack.
Guevara has 340 fighters compared to 3 ,500 government -backed soldiers.
So every decision, every tactic is going to count.
Guevara turns his focus to an armored train.
Two diesel engines, 17 freight cars.
It's massive. That train was shipping a huge stockpile of weapons made in the USA and effectively granted to Batista.
These weapons had been acquired before the U .S.
declared an arms embargo earlier in the year, which means that Batista can't replace them.
The battle begins on December 29th.
The fighting is intense.
Santa Clara's residents join Guevara's forces, providing shelter, barricading streets, throwing Molotov cocktails.
In the afternoon, Batista's men are pushed back and retreat to the armored train for protection.
Once the soldiers board, the train starts moving, presumably to escape.
And then... Instead, it gets blown up and derailed and it stops, you know, it just stops coal.
The train derails. Guevara had had tractors pull away pieces of the track that morning.
The symbolism of the train, you know, it's both stopping Batista and also blowing up the weaponry that had been supplied by the United States government.
The armored train, El Trenblindado, will become a Cuban national monument.
The derailed cars are still in place today.
In the moment, it's a sign that the tide has turned.
The war is almost over.
It's New Year's Eve.
Fulgencio Batista is throwing one of his famous parties at his home on a military base in Havana.
Usually there's dancing, drinking, cigars, but the mood is much more subdued for Cuba's elite, with the 26th of July forces quickly advancing.
I think it speaks to just how convinced he was that he was on safe ground and that he could engage in this kind of party in the very moments when, you know, the revolutionaries were nipping at his heels and about to take the state.
But the party starts without Batista.
When he does arrive, guests can sense that something is wrong.
And they're right. Earlier in the night, at 9 p .m., Batista had been told that Santa Clara had officially fallen to the 26th of July forces led by Che Guevara.
But even in the face of this stunning defeat, Batista makes an appearance at his party before slipping away.
From my perspective, no way in hell did Batista plan that he was going to flee the country that night.
He would never have left $8 million in cash.
I'm certain he would have destroyed the evidence of his own crimes and he didn't do that.
He would have been more prepared.
Batista meets with his top officials in his downstairs office, behind locked doors.
He reads his resignation letter and has others sign it.
Back at the party, no one knows what's going on.
Lillian Guerra interviewed Alfredo Sadule, a presidential bodyguard who was there that night.
He said that there was no general announcement and the party went on.
Some reports say that Batista came back to the party to announce his resignation.
But according to Sadule and others, once Batista left the party, he was gone.
That meant that all these other people, when they realized that Batista was gone, I mean, they must have panicked.
By the time Cuba learns of Batista's resignation in the wee hours of New Year's Day, 1959, the ex -president is already on his way to the Dominican Republic, where he'll be sheltered by Rafael Trujillo, another dictator.
But word spreads fast.
The radio stations announced that he fled and there was joy and jubilation and euphoria.
No way people were still sleeping and found out, everybody, there's no way you could have stayed in bed.
In the early morning, it was probably around, you know, two o 'clock in the morning, two to three in the morning.
The plaza was already packed with as many people as you could fit in there, which is at least maybe 200 ,000 people.
There were people just flooded into the streets.
While the 26th of July movement knew Batista's fall was close, they don't expect it to happen right after the victory at Santa Clara.
Fidel was not expecting it at all.
He was at his mom's house and he was celebrating Christmas.
But he and the 26th of July movement soon embraced the moment.
And they spent the first eight days of January creating a triumphant tour of the country where Fidel did this long caravan so that he could stop repeatedly, give a speech, people could see him.
And there are some locations where he gave a speech and the local 26th of July organizers had made a very large mural of his face.
And so he's standing on a stage standing next to a mural of himself in part so that they could project this image.
This is our man. This is the Messiah.
And they declared it in the very moment it was happening, the apotheosis of Fidel Castro.
He became godlike and he became, you know, the second coming of Jesus.
After a few months in the Dominican Republic, Batista flees to Portugal with an estimated $250 million fortune.
He'll live out the rest of his days in Europe before dying of a heart attack in 1973.
The Cuba he leaves behind at first is wildly optimistic about the opportunity Fidel Castro offers.
A new chance at real democracy based on the values of the 26th of July movement, a society that takes care of all of its citizens.
The original moral cause of the 26th of July movement was a cause of social justice that should be nobody in Cuba who is hungry, that there should be nobody in Cuba who doesn't have medical care, and there should be nobody in Cuba who wants an education who won't get it.
Unfortunately, that vision is not realized.
As Castro consolidates his power, it becomes more and more clear that he is abandoning these values.
So what makes this Cuban revolution different?
It was a hijacked by Fidel Castro, who ultimately betrayed the very thing that he said he would never betray.
We're going to have one party one state, you know, I mean, when elections became illegal, people kept thinking, well, maybe he's just doing this because he has to.
The messaging campaign by the 26th of July movement elevating Castro to near godlike status.
It makes it difficult for Cubans to question his decisions, even when they're contrary to the movement he once led.
There was so much invested by Cubans, Cuban individuals, your belief, your future, your faith, your everyday comforts in this project that was going to be transformative, and it would lay beyond the self.
And Fidel constantly, constantly tapped that, he constantly exploited that, and he reiterated it in ways that inspired people to continue to believe in it.
And what was absent from this process was participation at the level of representation.
You know, Fidel became your surrogate.
You know, Fidel was going to act for you.
Fidel knew best. And when Cubans surrendered their own agency to a man, they surrendered their future, and they surrendered their own citizenship, their own selves.
And once that happened, it was very difficult for literally individuals to say, my god, I was wrong.
It's impossible to compare the Batista and Castro regimes if one is worse than the other.
Lillian Guerra's grandfather criticized the years Batista was in power.
After Castro, her mother used communist as a dirty word.
But historians agree that the future thought possible on New Year's Day, 1959, was not the future that Cuba got.
Thanks for listening to History This Week, a Back Pocket Studios production in partnership with the History Channel.
To stay updated on all things History This Week, sign up at historythisweekpodcast .com.
And if you have any thoughts or questions, send us an email at historythisweek at history .com.
Special thanks to our guests, Lillian Guerra, professor of Cuban and Caribbean history at the University of Florida, and author of Heroes, Martyrs, and Political Maasaias in Revolutionary Cuba.
And Julia Swig, author of Cuba, What Everyone Needs to Know.
This episode was produced and sound designed by Ben Dixteen.
It was also produced by David Weisboard and hosted by me, Alana Casanova Burgess.
For Back Pocket Studios, our executive producers are Ben Dixteen and David Weisbord.
From the History Channel, our executive producers are Eli Lehrer and Liv Fidler.
Don't forget to follow, rate, and review History This Week wherever you get your podcasts.
And we'll see you next week.
