With his chances of working within the system gone, Fidel and fellow activists in decided to take direct action. This resounding victory, Fidel hoped, would provoke Cubans to rise up against Batista and restore constitutional democracy. From the start, it was a fiasco. As his convoy of 15 cars approached the Moncada before dawn on July 26, it ran into two patrolmen. Fidel stopped his car and leapt out to deal with them, but this confused the other rebels, who mistook a military hospital for the Moncada and began firing wildly.
By the time they had regrouped, soldiers were everywhere. Fidel ordered a retreat, but most of his men surrendered. The reaction of the army shocked Cubans.
Many, in fact, had been gruesomely tortured. Fidel was captured in the countryside soon after, by a by-the-books officer who refused to hand his prisoner over to superiors who wanted to dispense summary justice.
It was the first of countless lucky breaks in the story of the revolution. Nothing short of true revolution would change Cuba, he concluded, although the chances of his becoming personally involved seemed remote. It was a moment of over-confidence that the dictator would soon regret. From exile in Mexico City, Fidel concocted a plan that seemed even more harebrained than the Moncada attack: to return to Cuba in a secret amphibious landing and begin an insurgency in the mountains.
He bought a secondhand boat, the Granma , from an American expat and gathered a band of fellow firebrands, among them Ernesto Guevara. Travel in Cuba is never straightforward.
The Granma landing site and Sierra base are unusually far-flung, so an enterprising Cuban friend of a friend offered to drive us there in his own car for a tidy sum in U. It was time to scramble for Plan B. We soon had a dozen local insiders scouring Cuba for any possible vehicle, with emails flying to expat acquaintances as far away as Toronto and Brussels. Still, on a steamy afternoon I drove us south of Santiago toward the famous Granma landing site, along one of the most spectacular and worst-maintained roads in the Western Hemisphere.
On this wild shore, the ocean hits the coast with terrifying force. Much of the route has been wrecked by hurricanes and landslides, becoming a bare expanse of slippery rocks that could only be traversed at five miles an hour. We were the only visitors that day, she admitted, directing us toward a sun-blasted concrete walkway that had been laid across the mangroves. The Granma had turned out to be barely seaworthy, more suited for a pleasure cruise than a military operation, and was seriously overloaded.
Local supporters who had planned to meet the boat when it landed gave up when it failed to appear on time. As government air patrols threatened them on December 2, Fidel ordered the pilot to head to shore before sunrise, unaware that he had chosen the most inhospitable spot on the entire Cuban coastline.
At around a. The guerrillas were basically city slickers, and few had even seen mangroves. They sunk waist-deep into mud and struggled over abrasive roots. But the army had already gotten wind of their arrival, and three days later, on December 5, the rebels were caught in a surprise attack as they rested by a sugar-cane field.
The official figure is that, of the 82 guerrillas, 21 were killed 2 in combat, 19 executed , 21 were taken prisoner and 19 gave up the fight. The 21 survivors were lost in the Sierra.
Soldiers were swarming. Today, our stroll through the mangroves was decidedly less arduous, although the 1,meter path gives a vivid idea of the claustrophobia of the alien landscape. It was a relief when the horizon opened up to the sparkling Caribbean. A concrete jetty was being installed on the landing spot for the upcoming 60th anniversary celebrations, when a replica of the Granma will arrive for the faithful to admire.
A few days after the Granma debacle, the handful of survivors were reunited in the mountains with the aid of campesinos. Fidel asked how many guns he had saved. His fantastical confidence was unbowed. As they settled into the Sierra Maestra, the urban intellectuals quickly realized they were now dependent on the campesinos for their very survival.
Luckily, there was a built-in reservoir of support. Many in the Sierra had been evicted from their land by the Rural Guards and were virtual refugees, squatting in dirt-floor huts and subsisting by growing coffee and marijuana. The romance with Fidel developed slowly over the following months, says biographer Stout. Young farmhands swelled the rebel ranks as soldiers. The campesinos also risked the savage reprisals of soldiers of the Rural Guard, who beat, raped or executed peasants they suspected of rebel sympathies.
Today, the Sierra is still a frayed cobweb of dirt roads that lead to a few official attractions—oddities like the Museum of the Heroic Campesino—but my accidental meetings are more vivid. The father had been an organizer for the sharecroppers in the area, and one day an assassin walked up and shot him in the face. People came from all around, friends, relatives, supporters. Of course, we had to kill a pig to feed them all at the funeral.
He ran away to join the guerrillas to get out of his debts. For six months, Fidel and his battered band lay low, training for combat and scoring unusual propaganda points.
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Photo Essays. Travelers Choice Awards. Weekend Getaways. Air Travel. Business Travel. Packing Tips. The Future of Travel. Travel Etiquette. Travel Tips. Their coverage helped create an attractive mythology about this previously obscure figure as he led a small band of rebels to seize power. The fascination was mutual. If Ava Gardner, Frank Sinatra and the most famous celebrities of the s flocked to the Cuba of Batista and the American mafia for fun-filled vice, the stars of American journalism in the post-revolution era, including Barbara Walters and Walter Cronkite, all rushed to Havana with equal enthusiasm for a political tango with Fidel Castro.
In October , U. The list of problems was an understated catalogue of what would follow for the next half century. Within months of the break in relations, the U. Earlier, in another of its January editorials, the Times had practically ridiculed Cuba for its fear of a military attack by the U. Ironically, it was The New York Times that uncovered the plot and ran a front-page story 10 days before the attack detailing the training and amassing of anti-Castro forces at bases in Florida in preparation for an invasion.
The story drew the ire of President Kennedy following the Bay of Pigs fiasco. A year later, the Cuban missile crisis of October brought the world close to the brink of catastrophic nuclear war. Most historians agree that the risk of nuclear war was even greater than the leaders of the countries involved — John F.
Kennedy, Nikita Khrushchev and Fidel Castro — believed at the time. A whole generation of Americans who lived through those 13 days of traumatic standoff — dealing with nuclear shelters and drills — were permanently affected in terms of their views and vilification of Cuba and Fidel Castro. Even I was surprised by the rawness of that comment. Nevertheless, according to most historians, throughout this period there were regular secret attempts to normalize diplomatic relations.
Shortly before the assassination of President Kennedy , Washington sent messages to Castro to explore a path toward normalization. When Lyndon Johnson succeeded Kennedy , he too sought to restore ties but insisted on conditions unacceptable to Havana, including an end to its close ties with the Soviets and its revolutionary activities in Latin America, as well as talk of compensation for nationalized U.
During the administration of Richard Nixon , the U. During the Carter administration the U. By mutual agreement in , the U. The Mariel boatlift of , which saw an estimated , Cubans migrate to the U. Bush , the U.
This historic conclusion to the Cold War suggested to many that the moment had arrived when ties between the U. With the chaotic end of the U. During the election campaign that brought Bill Clinton to the White House, Clinton opportunistically supported legislation to impose tougher sanctions on Cuba that only served to complicate his own efforts toward normalization once in power His opposition to congressional efforts to impose additional restrictions was compromised when Cuba shot down two planes of Cuban-American anti-Castro operatives that breached Cuban airspace in A few weeks later Clinton signed into law a further tightening and continuation of the embargo against Cuba.
The final notable drama during the Clinton years was the Elian Gonzalez saga. Gonzalez was a six-year-old boy whose mother had drowned while fleeing Cuba with him on a leaky raft. During the two terms of President George W. Throughout these five decades of the U. However, in the s the Times became more animated in challenging the logic and efficacy of the embargo and broken relations, and encouraged normalization particularly as more countries in Latin America restored ties with Havana and became increasingly vocal critics of the U.
The deterioration in relations was not reversed during the George H. Bush administration, and right wing members of Congress felt emboldened to push relentlessly for yet more sanctions. There is, finally, something indecent about vociferous exiles living safely in Miami prescribing more pain for their poorer cousins. Clinton was urged by senior advisers to use his veto.
He signed, he said, to strike back at the Castro regime for shooting down two civilian planes. The establishment of the Helms-Burton law is considered something of a case study of the elite media versus mass public opinion when it comes to influencing policymakers.
In the seven months following the plucking of Elian Gonzalez from the waters off the Florida coast, the Times ran 15 editorials calling for the return of Elian to his father in Cuba. The saga of this Cuban child helped to hasten that shift in policy. The contested election of George W. Bush, with Cuban-Americans in Florida attempting to stop the recount of challenged votes in order to prevent a Gore victory, probably sealed the fate of U. The Times , however, took comfort in the gradually changing views of many Republican members of Congress and seized every opportunity to press for change.
While the White House promised even tougher enforcement of the aging embargo, Congress searched for ways to increase people-to-people contacts, which many Republicans supported. In , Fidel Castro finally stepped down due to failing health and transferred power to his brother Raul. The Times saw it as an opportunity to press for a more forward-looking U. Bush has made it much harder for academics, artists, religious people and anyone else who might spread the good word about America to travel to Cuba, and much harder for Cubans to travel here.
We believe the economic embargo should be completely lifted. But normalization of ties and an end to the embargo still seemed beyond reach. As far back as , public opinion in the United States shifted toward more-or-less consistent support for the normalization of ties with Cuba see Table 1.
This approval for establishing diplomatic relations first registers in , with 51 percent favoring such a relationship to 33 percent opposed. But a majority still favored normalization five years into the Reagan presidency. What these surveys make clear is that for a long time, neither mass public opinion nor the advocacy of elite newspaper editorials such as those in The New York Times influenced policy makers on Cuba as much as the extreme views of the Cuban-American constituency in the U.
By the time Obama became president Cuban-American views had begun to change dramatically.
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