The uprising that turned a Caribbean island into a Cold War battlefield — a guerrilla war led by Fidel Castro that toppled the US-backed dictator Fulgencio Batista in 1959, turned Cuba, within a few years, into the Americas’ first communist state ninety miles from Florida, and survived invasion, embargo, and a nuclear standoff while dividing opinion ever since between a beacon of defiance and a prison island.
A small band of bearded fighters came down from the mountains and took an island ninety miles from Florida. They overthrew a dictator the United States had backed, and within three years they had built the Americas' first communist state, allied it to the Soviet Union, and helped bring the world to the edge of nuclear war. The Cuban Revolution survived an invasion and a crushing US embargo and outlived the Soviet Union that bankrolled it. It still divides people sharply. To its admirers it ended a corrupt tyranny, taught nearly the whole island to read, and gave Cuba universal health care and schooling, and a fierce independence from a powerful neighbor. To its critics it built a one-party police state that jailed its opponents, silenced its press, and sent generations of Cubans fleeing into exile. Both ledgers are real, and the argument between them is not settled.