From our Bureau of Dismal Anniversaries with some assistance from our Bureau of Zombie Dictatorships
On the 26th of July 1953 Fidel and Raul Castro and a band of ill-prepared would-be rebels attacked the Moncada barracks in Santiago de Cuba, in a futile effort to unseat dictator Fulgencio Batista, who had seized the presidency in March 1952.
The attack was as bloody as it was disastrous. Fifteen soldiers and three policemen were killed and 23 soldiers and five policemen wounded during the attack to the Moncada Barracks. Nine of Fidel’s “rebels” were killed in combat, 11 wounded, four of them by friendly fire, and 42 were executed later.
Fidel and Raul escaped unharmed and were imprisoned in very cushy fashion due to the fact that Fidel was married to a prominent socialite at the time, Mirta Francisca de la Caridad Díaz-Balart y Gutiérrez . Fidel used his time behind bars to write a memoir-cum-manifesto “History Will Absolve Me” that aped his idol and role model Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf and which he delivered as a four-hour speech at his trial. The cushiness of his imprisonment also allowed him to begin an adulterous romance with another socialite, Naty Revuelta, with whom he would eventually sire a daughter.
Fidel and his rebels were granted amnesty by President Batista in 1955, thanks mostly to his influential high society in-laws, the Diaz-Balart family and many of their elite Social Register friends. Fidel immediately divorced his wife Mirta, left the island, and began to plot his return from the U.S. and Mexico.
The rest, as they say, is history. He returned to Cuba with a small band of inept rebels,-including the Argentine Che Guevara, hid in the Sierra Maestra mountains, took pot-shots at Batista’s soldiers, and– after being catapulted to international fame by New York Times reporter Herbert Matthews — his high profile in the news media managed to convince U.S President Dwight Eisenhower to withdraw his support from Batista, who then fled the country on New Year’s eve 1959 with his tail between his legs and his vast fortune securely stashed in suitcases. The self-aggrandizing and narcissistic sociopath Fidel would name his insurgency the July 26 movement and mark this date as the beginning of his so-called Revolution.
Seventy years later, Cuba is a labyrinth of ruins and one of the world’s most repressive hellholes. Fidel is a zombie who still rules the island with the help of the devil, and the zombie dictatorship he created is still called “The Revolution.” His carcass was incinerated in 2016 and entombed in a giant boulder, but he is still very much alive and kicking, devouring the Cuban people in good zombie fashion, and his repressive and monumentally destructive legacy endures.
Needless to say, this is one of the saddest days in Cuban history, a date that should be stricken from the calendar.
The Castro bastards escaped unharmed because they kept well out of harm’s way, since they never intended to die fighting or even get a serious scratch. The attack had zero chance of succeeding, but it accomplished its real goal of making Fidel Castro a national figure, which is all the bastard cared about.
The worst mistake Batista ever made was to spare the Castros, but Batista was a half-assed dictator who was too insecure to take the bull by the horns. Because he came from a poor socioeconomic background and was of mixed race, he was too vulnerable and susceptible to white upper class elements, since he was desperate to “overcome” his perceived inferiority and definitely did not want to be seen as a brutish mulatto.