IB History Role of Conflict Notes

The Role of Conflict: From the Granma to Havana

Exile in Mexico and the Formation of M-26-7

1. Following his release from prison under a general amnesty in May 1955, Fidel Castro briefly attempted to re-enter Cuba's legal political arena.
2. Within six weeks, however, he and his brother Raul had fled to Mexico, fearing rearrest or assassination by Batista's secret police, the BRAC.
3. This flight reinforced Castro's existing conviction that neither Cuba nor Latin America more broadly could achieve meaningful change through parliamentary methods alone.
4. From exile, Castro organised the Movimiento 26 de Julio, or M-26-7, named for the date of the failed Moncada attack, to prepare systematically for an eventual return to Cuba.
5. Inside Cuba, M-26-7 members formed secret underground cells, including one established by Frank Pais in Santiago de Cuba, to stockpile weapons and spread the Moncada Programme's promises.
6. While in Mexico, Castro met the young Cuban nationalist Camilo Cienfuegos and the Argentine doctor Ernesto Che Guevara, both committed opponents of US corporate influence across Latin America.
7. Castro himself remained, at this stage, less committed to explicit Marxist ideology than Guevara, prioritising Cuban nationalism over doctrinal communism.
8. In 1956, Castro publicly rejected Batista's accusations that he was a communist, pointedly noting that Batista's own 1940 election had depended on support from Cuba's official Communist Party.
9. This public rejection of communism was a calculated political move designed to reassure Castro's more conservative and moderate domestic supporters.
10. By early 1956, Castro had gathered enough independent support to formally break M-26-7 away from its origins within the Ortodoxo party.

The Granma Expedition, November 1956

1. In Mexico, Castro secretly recruited, armed, and trained a force of 82 volunteers for his planned invasion of Cuba.
2. Using funds gathered from several anti-Batista sources, including former president Prio, Castro purchased an old, worn yacht named the Granma to carry his invasion force.
3. The rebels landed near Manzanillo in western Oriente province, a location chosen partly for its symbolism, since it lay 288 kilometres west of where Jose Marti had landed in 1895.
4. The Cuban Communist Party, the PSP, attempted to persuade Castro against launching the expedition at all, favouring non-violent opposition instead.
5. When that failed, PSP representatives tried to delay the expedition until January, hoping to coordinate it with planned strike activity during the sugar harvest.
6. Castro refused to delay, having publicly promised to return to Cuba before the end of 1956 and aware of the propaganda value of keeping that promise.
7. Chronic lack of funds and the need for secrecy meant the rebels were poorly equipped, and the Granma itself, designed for 25 passengers, carried 82 men in dangerously overcrowded conditions.
8. The 1,988 kilometre crossing from Mexico proved hazardous, with the boat nearly sinking in a storm and suffering repeated mechanical failures.
9. Supplies were thrown overboard to keep the vessel afloat, and the crossing ultimately took two days longer than planned, throwing off the timing of the entire operation.

The Santiago Uprising and Disaster in the Swamp

1. The original plan called for a popular uprising in Santiago de Cuba timed to coincide with a simultaneous attack on the Moncada Barracks once the Granma had landed.
2. Because the sea crossing ran two days late, Frank Pais's Santiago uprising was launched before Castro's force had actually landed to support it.
3. Pais's rebel cells engaged government forces alone for roughly 30 hours before being forced to withdraw without the reinforcement they had expected.
4. Even in this failure, at least 67 government soldiers reportedly refused to fight the rebels during the Santiago fighting, a striking sign of how far support for Castro's cause had already spread since 1953.
5. Some Santiago police officers went further still, joining the rebels outright and willingly handing over their weapons.
6. When the Granma finally reached Cuba, it ran aground short of its intended landing point, forcing the exhausted, seasick revolutionaries to wade ashore through mudflats carrying their heavy equipment.
7. Spotted almost immediately by Batista's aircraft and warships, the rebels abandoned much of their equipment and pushed inland into dense swampland to escape.
8. Within days, the fleeing rebels walked directly into a government ambush that came close to destroying the entire expedition.
9. Of the original 82 revolutionaries who had sailed from Mexico, only around 18 survived the trek through what Castro later described as that hellish swamp and into the Sierra Maestra mountains.
10. Castro later claimed most of his dead had been executed after capture rather than killed in combat, a claim consistent with the government's documented treatment of captured rebels after the earlier Moncada attack.

Gaining the Support of the Rural Working Class

1. The eighteen survivors, including the Castro brothers, Che Guevara, and Camilo Cienfuegos, regrouped deep in the Sierra Maestra to form the core of a new guerrilla army.
2. Castro's rebels, known as the Fidelistas, were under strict orders to treat impoverished rural workers with genuine respect, paying fairly for supplies and offering free medical care wherever possible.
3. Che Guevara, a trained physician, personally provided many rural villagers with the first proper medical attention they had ever received in their lives.
4. The rebel code of conduct explicitly forbade torture and murder, extended humane treatment to wounded and captured enemy soldiers, and punished rebels who mistreated local civilians.
5. To many rural Cubans, this form of revolutionary discipline appeared strikingly more just than the corruption and violence they had experienced under the existing state legal and police system.
6. Fidelistas also assisted rural workers with physically demanding agricultural tasks, using this shared labour as an opportunity to listen to grievances and explain the Moncada Programme's promises directly.
7. Abusive landlords and corrupt local officials identified by rural communities were tried and punished by Castro's forces, converting the guerrilla movement into a functioning alternative justice system.
8. Through these consistent methods, Castro successfully converted the rural working class's initial passive sympathy into active, committed support by the middle of 1957.
9. Ironically, Batista's own army proved to be one of the guerrillas' most effective recruiters, since its brutal reprisals against rural communities suspected of helping the rebels only deepened local support for Castro.

The Rural Guerrilla Campaign

1. Batista's army adopted a largely reactive strategy, relying on superior US-supplied tanks, aircraft, and artillery while remaining concentrated within fortified garrisons rather than pursuing the rebels into the mountains.
2. This defensive posture turned government forces into comparatively static targets, allowing the mobile, fast-moving rebels to strike and disappear before an effective response could be organised.
3. Rebel units frequently attacked army patrols specifically to seize weapons and ammunition, using captured government supplies to grow their own military capacity over time.
4. Castro had not originally planned to fight from a rural mountain base, but the failure of the Santiago uprising and the disastrous Granma landing forced him to abandon his initial urban-focused strategy.
5. This willingness to adapt quickly to a rural guerrilla campaign after his original urban plan collapsed is widely identified by historians as a key factor behind Castro's eventual success.
6. Other opponents of Batista also attempted armed resistance during this period, but each attempt failed in turn: students in March 1957, former president Prio's supporters in May 1957, and naval officers at Cienfuegos in September 1957.
7. The repeated failure of these rival resistance efforts helped cement Castro and his Sierra Maestra guerrillas as the only credible organised opposition to Batista's regime.
8. By demonstrating sustained, growing military effectiveness where every other opposition movement had failed, Castro's guerrillas increasingly attracted defectors, volunteers, and covert support from across Cuban society.
9. This process of elimination, in which rival forms of armed resistance repeatedly failed, gave Castro's specific guerrilla strategy an outsized historical significance relative to its small original size.

Urban Resistance and the Power of Propaganda

1. The vital contribution of urban revolutionaries to the Cuban Revolution is often understated in accounts that focus primarily on the rural guerrilla campaign.
2. Urban M-26-7 cells conducted sabotage and produced anti-regime propaganda, coordinating closely with sympathetic middle-class professionals and former Ortodoxo activists in Cuba's major cities.
3. According to one historical estimate, more than 30,000 individual acts of sabotage were carried out by urban resistance networks over the course of the two-year guerrilla campaign.
4. Historian Sebastian Balfour has directly argued that the war in the Sierra Maestra could not accurately be described in any sense as a purely peasant war, given how essential this urban contribution proved to be.
5. Carlos Franqui, a former M-26-7 propagandist who later broke with Castro over his alignment with the Soviet Union, criticised what he called the great man narrative crediting the revolution to Castro and his immediate circle alone.
6. Franqui argued this narrative erased the genuine contributions of urban fighters, striking workers, and the ordinary Cubans who organised boycotts and strikes against Batista's rule.
7. Castro understood the power of propaganda from the very start of his movement, having originally planned to seize the radio station at Moncada itself to broadcast revolutionary messages in 1953.
8. In 1957, the rebels established Radio Rebelde specifically to broadcast their own version of events and directly counter the government's official narrative.
9. New York Times journalist Herbert Matthews was allowed into the Sierra Maestra for a carefully stage-managed interview in February 1957, which gave Castro's small force the false public impression of controlling a much wider mountain area.
10. This interview transformed international press coverage of the conflict, shifting American and Cuban attention from Havana's resort atmosphere to the rebels' specific demands for the first time.

Batista's Counter-Attack: Operation Verano, 1958

1. Frank Pais's murder by police in Santiago in July 1957 triggered the largest spontaneous strike movement against Batista since his 1952 coup, spreading across several provinces.
2. Batista responded to this unrest by suspending constitutional rights entirely, further cementing his international reputation as an undemocratic dictator.
3. By spring 1958, sustained rebel pressure had forced Batista's forces to withdraw entirely from the Sierra Maestra region, a significant strategic victory for Castro's movement.
4. Convinced the military tide had turned decisively in his favour by June 1958, Batista launched Operation Verano, deploying around 12,000 government troops backed by tanks, artillery, and air support.
5. More than half of these troops, roughly 7,000 men, were poorly trained conscripts with little genuine motivation to fight a determined guerrilla enemy.
6. Operational command was further weakened by rivalry between two competing generals, one of whom, Alberto del Rio Chaviano, had personally overseen the torture of captured Moncada attackers back in 1953.
7. Castro's forces, by contrast, knew the mountainous terrain intimately, prepared minefields and ambush positions in advance, and received detailed intelligence from a local population now firmly loyal to the rebel cause.
8. The campaign's first major engagements proved disastrous for the government, and captured or surrounded soldiers were frequently offered the choice to surrender and join the rebels rather than face continued fighting.
9. During the Battle of Las Mercedes in July and August 1958, Castro successfully negotiated a ceasefire under false pretences, allowing his trapped forces to escape entirely once negotiations collapsed.

Victory, December 1958 to January 1959

1. Following the collapse of Operation Verano, Batista's own forces understood that his regime's military position had become effectively unsustainable.
2. Castro immediately launched a counter-offensive into central Cuba, his ranks now swelled by rural recruits and growing numbers of army deserters.
3. By December 1958, the Fidelistas numbered nearly 3,000 fighters, a remarkable expansion from the eighteen survivors who had reached the Sierra Maestra just two years earlier.
4. Most of the rebels' additional weapons and ammunition came not from foreign supporters but directly from Batista's own retreating and surrendering forces.
5. After intense fighting in the cities of Santiago and Santa Clara, and the defeat of the government garrison at Yaguajay on 30 December 1958, Batista's position finally collapsed.
6. Batista fled Cuba for the Dominican Republic in the early hours of 1 January 1959, ending his rule without a final decisive battle for the capital itself.
7. Fidel Castro's columns, led by Che Guevara and Camilo Cienfuegos, entered Havana on 2 January 1959, while Castro himself arrived in the capital on 8 January after a triumphant journey across the island, completing a guerrilla campaign that had begun with just eighteen survivors in the Sierra Maestra little more than two years before.

Historiographical Debate: The Great Man or the Whole Movement?