Word: moncada
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...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...
Seldom had a government been so thoroughly housecleaned between midnight and dawn. But to Castro, flushed with victory, the exodus was a bitter cheat. Arriving in Santiago, he took the big (5,000-man) Moncada fortress from the surrendering army without firing a shot, declared Santiago the provisional capital of Cuba as reward for its support. In Las Villas, ruthless, Red-loving Che Guevara executed the last Batista holdouts...
Fidel Castro Ruz, 32, the rebel chief, is a nonpracticing lawyer who began fighting Batista in 1953 by leading a frontal attack on Moncada barracks in Santiago. He named his 26th of July movement for the day the attack failed, went into Mexican exile, returned to invade Oriente province with 81 men aboard the yacht Gramma on Dec. 2, 1956. Castro likes to sit about a campfire and talk military science, citing Rommel and Napoleon, and discussing romantic proposals for Cuba, e.g., a school-city for 20,000 children. In 1953 he called for nationalization of U.S.-owned public utilities...
...fresh troops flown in, had twice attempted to break through the rebel ring only to fail. The government still talked of an "all-out offensive"; the talk lost much of its steam when the Santiago commander bought up every foot of barbed wire in town, spun it around Moncada barracks and along the airport road...
...quiet, bars deserted. All outgoing-plane space had been taken for a week in advance. The Texas Co.. which runs a refinery near Santiago, chartered a plane to get 44 dependents of U.S. employees away in time. As the army pulled back its outposts, the dun walls of Moncada Barracks, six blocks square in the heart of Santiago, bristled with troops. Only twelve miles across Santiago Bay, a 150-man column of rebels was boldly encamped...