Sunil Kumar Banerjee रीट्वीट किया
In 1953, Fidel Castro made his first move against the Cuban government of Fulgencio Batista by attacking the Moncada Barracks in Santiago de Cuba with roughly 160 fighters, hoping to spark a nationwide revolt.
The assault failed badly, and Batista's forces killed dozens of rebels, with many more captured and executed after surrendering.
Castro was arrested, tried, and sentenced to 15 years in prison, where he famously declared before the court, "Condemn me, it does not matter. History will absolve me."
Batista eventually released all political prisoners in 1955, bowing to public pressure, and Castro immediately went into exile in Mexico to regroup and plan his next move.
In Mexico, Castro connected with Che Guevara, a young Argentine doctor, and began assembling a small revolutionary force with the intention of returning to Cuba and overthrowing the Batista government.
The group acquired a 60-foot diesel-powered yacht called the Granma, a vessel originally built in 1943 for the U.S. Navy and designed to accommodate just 12 people.
The yacht was in poor condition, with badly worn gears that prevented it from reaching significant speed, and a radio that could only receive signals but not transmit, making communication with allies in Cuba impossible.
The craft was dangerously overcrowded with weapons, ammunition, and 82 men, and because the ship's fuel tanks held only 1,200 gallons, an additional 2,000 gallons in cans had to be stored on deck to make the crossing.
Just after midnight on November 25, 1956, the 82 fighters slipped out of the Mexican port of Tuxpan in the dark and set sail for Cuba, a crossing that was supposed to take five days.
Rough seas, engine problems, excessive weight, and a man who fell overboard all combined to delay the journey, pushing back their scheduled arrival from November 30 to December 2.
The delay proved costly, as a coordinated uprising in Santiago de Cuba that was meant to distract Batista's forces had already launched and been crushed before the Granma even landed.
The navigator fell overboard while trying to spot the Cabo Cruz lighthouse, and after being rescued, Castro ordered the ship to make for the nearest stretch of land, but the vessel crashed into a sandbar a mile short of the intended landing point, in a mangrove swamp.
The men were forced to wade ashore in the mud, abandoning much of their food, ammunition, and medicine in the process.
Cuban coast guard vessels spotted them almost immediately and relayed their location to the armed forces, putting Batista's military on high alert across the region.
The rebels split into two groups and began pushing inland toward the Sierra Maestra mountains, harassed by helicopters and aircraft that pounded the exposed coastline.
On December 5, the exhausted men stopped to rest in a field of sugarcane at a place called Alegria de Pio, but failed to post proper sentries, and at four in the afternoon, government troops tipped off by a local peasant attacked and scattered them.
The ambush was devastating, with most of the 82 men killed, captured, or lost in the chaos of the fighting.
Only around a dozen men survived intact enough to regroup, among them Fidel, Raul, Che Guevara, and Camilo Cienfuegos.
Castro and a companion named Universo Sanchez found themselves alone and were later joined by Faustino Perez, and for days the three of them crept cautiously through the countryside, surviving on sugarcane, until they located a sympathetic farmer who hid them while other survivors were tracked down and reunited with the group.
Among those who eventually rejoined were Raul Castro and Che Guevara, who had suffered a flesh wound in the neck during the ambush.
This shattered but unbroken core of survivors made their way into the Sierra Maestra mountains, where they would rebuild their forces and wage a guerrilla campaign that would topple Batista's government in just over two years.
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