On This Day in History: July 26

The beginning of the Cuban Revolution

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I wonder how Che Guevara would feel about gringo trust fund teens using mom’s credit card to buy t-shirts with his face on it from Amazon. For good or ill, Che and his buddy Fidel were an inspiration to those far beyond the Cuban shores, and the anti-communist cockstains in the CIA were not fucking having it.

--On This Day in History, Shit Went Down: July 26, 1953--

July 26 is a big day in Cuba. The Batista regime was corrupt as fuck. And weak. Pretty fucking useless, really. That’s important. But rebel leader Fidel Castro and brother Raul were kind of useless at the beginning as well. On that day in 1953 they launched a strike against two military targets in Cuba and got their asses kicked. The Castros fled to the mountains while many of their fighters were captured and later executed. Oops.

A couple of years later Che joined the rebel cause, and they went guerrilla. They called themselves the “26th of July Movement” because I guess getting fucked up on the field of battle is inspiring. Anyway, years of fighting blah fucking blah, President Batista had an unhappy New Year because he knew he was done for as el presidente, so he fled the country in the early hours of January 1, 1959.

Now to summarize my master’s thesis in as few words as possible.

A whole bunch of other Latin American countries languishing under corrupt right-wing regimes saw what happened in Cuba and said cool fucking frijoles. Let’s do what they did. And so, they tried, but the CIA was like “Commies bad! Truman Doctrine! Contain that shit!” and they started intervening all over to bolster various fascist military dictators so they wouldn’t be overthrown by their rebel movements.

Here is the thing: It’s not so much the strength of the rebellion that leads to revolution, but the weakness of the regime in power. A strong regime can withstand decades of rebellion, even against a powerful guerrilla force. But the Batista regime was as weak as a kitten with Covid. My thesis argued that the post-Cuba CIA intervention didn’t really matter, because all those other Latin American countries had regimes strong enough to withstand their rebel movements from overthrowing them without CIA help. All but one: Guatemala.

The Guatemalan regime in the early 60s was Batista-like in its utter uselessness, and therefore ripe for revolution. Then the CIA came in and said quit fucking around and gave them money and guns and advisors and shit, so the rebels never stood a chance.

Didn’t stop them from trying, though. Lotta genocide followed.

Get the book ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY SH!T WENT DOWN.