Word: moncada
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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...
...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...
...rebels knew that they were gaining, but they did not realize that victory was so close at hand. On Christmas Eve a priest climbed the hills to report to Castro that General Eulogio Cantillo, commander of Moncada Barracks, would like to have a chat. Castro celebrated by coming down to the family farm at Mayari, his first visit in four years. "Oh, what a party we had that night!" says his mother. "His soldiers were all over the place, and he bought $1,000 worth of beef to feed the people from all around...
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...