Cuba in the 1950s an introduction

In March 1952, a few months after a poll in the magazine Bohemia told that would loose rights for the Cuban presidency; Fulgencio Batista took over the Cuban government in coup d'état. The U.S., already familiar with Batista from their previous collaboration in the 1930s and his presidency in 1940, recognized his government within two weeks.

Batista's reappearance on the Cuban political scene in such a manner became the major factor that influenced the decade, giving rise to a movement of opposition that culminated with the triumph of the Cuban revolution on the first day of 1959.

The second event that set the stage for the decade came on July 26 1953, when the Castro brothers and about one hundred other rebels attacked the Moncada army barracks in Oriente Province. The attack was a failure, and the few rebels who were not killed were caught, tried, and was punished with 15 years in prison.

Under the power of Meyer Lansky, Havana had become the most important city with the expected increase in tourism . The rich people were living well, but there seemed to be many more who had much less, and the spirit of revolution started to have more followers .

The Castro brothers and the rest of the Moncada prisoners were set free in 1955 after a public campaign, and were joined by Ernesto Che Guevara.

Che Guevara

His real name was Ernesto but he was commonly known as “Che” or “El che”. He was an Argentine Marxist revolutionary, guerrilla leader, diplomat, and military theorist. A major figure of the Cuban Revolution.

As a young medical student, Guevara traveled throughout South America and was amazed by the poverty, hunger, and disease he witnessed. His burgeoning desire to help overturn what he saw as the capitalist exploitation of Latin America by the United States prompted his involvement in Guatemala's social reforms under President Jacobo Árbenz, whose eventual CIA-assisted overthrow at the behest of the United Fruit Company solidified Guevara's political ideology. Later, while living in Mexico City, he met Raúl and Fidel Castro, joined their 26th of July Movement, and sailed to Cuba aboard the yacht, Granma, with the intention of overthrowing US-backed Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista. Guevara soon rose to prominence among the insurgents, was promoted to second-in-command, and played a pivotal role in the victorious two-year guerrilla campaign that deposed the Batista regime.

Che

Guevara

Fidel Raul

Castro

Once an interviewer asked che about the economy they would develop after they would get into the government, and he answered:

“I am not interested in dry economic socialism. We are fighting against misery, but we are also fighting against alienation. One of the fundamental objectives of Marxism is to remove interest, the factor of individual interest, and gain, from people’s psychological motivations. Marx was preoccupied both with economic factors and with their repercussions on the spirit. If

communism isn’t interested in this too, it may be a method of distributing goods, but it will never be a revolutionary way of life.”

Bibliografiahttp://www.che-lives.com/che-guevara-quotes/

http://www.hey-che.com/famous-quotes-from-el-che-guevara/

http://www.biography.com/people/che-guevara-9322774