Word: fideles
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...when the vanguard of 1,100 hot-eyed Caribbean revolutionaries set out in a ship from Cuba's eastern coast, bound east to invade Dictator Rafael Leonidas Trujillo's Dominican Republic, idealistic Fidel Castro was aboard. Cuban gunboats intercepted the rebels and Castro swam three miles to shore, his Tommy gun still on his back. He turned to law, defended a few friends in political trouble, a few farmers evicted from their plots; he honeymooned in New York with his bride Mirtha. fathered a son named Fidel, settled down in Havana. At 2:43 on the morning...
...sold his law books and car, recruited his brother Raul and 150-odd friends, raised $20,000 for guns and contraband army uniforms. At dawn on July 26. 1953, Fidel Castro led a column of 13 cars to the walls of Santiago's bristling Moncada barracks, a yellow stone pile where 1,000 Batista troops lay sleeping. A suspicious Jeep patrol came up. Castro, then 26, stepped out, raised his twelve-gauge shotgun and shot his first man. "That was the mistake," he recalls. "I had told them all to do what I did, and they all opened fire...
Months in Solitary. Fidel's trial, on charges of leading an armed uprising, was all that a lawyer-revolutionary could ask. Rising for a three-hour oration, Castro described the attack in fearless detail, diagnosed Cuba's social ills-"The 900,000 farmers and workers, miserably exploited, with perennial work their only future and the grave their only rest." He denounced Batista's corruption and tyranny: "We were born in a free country, and we would rather see this island sink to the bottom of the ocean than consent to be anybody's slave." Concluding...
...Fidel served seven months in solitary confinement on the Isle of Pines, passing the time by memorizing an English dictionary. His wife, whose father had become a Cabinet minister's aide, divorced him. Then Batista, cocky and prosperous, declared an amnesty in 1955 for political prisoners, including Castro...
...Well," said Fidel one day, "you are telling us tactics for cowards." "No," said Bayo, "for intelligent people. You cannot go in there and face 21,000 well-equipped troops in open battle. You are going to be there like mosquitoes. Your attack on Moncada was & big mistake." Castro, who had already named his movement "26th of July'' for the date of the Moncada attack, was hurt. But he force-marched his rebels through the mountains 15 hours a day, learned mapmaking, bomb making and marksmanship. On Nov. 26, 1956, Castro and 81 revolutionaries set to sea from...