26th of July Movement in the context of "Manuel Urrutia Lleó"

Cuba, officially the Republic of Cuba, is an island country in the Caribbean. It comprises 4,195 islands, islets and cays, including the eponymous main island and Isla de la Juventud. Situated at the confluence of the Caribbean Sea, Gulf of Mexico, and Atlantic Ocean, Cuba is located east of the Yucatán Peninsula, south of both Florida (the United States) and the Bahamas, west of Hispaniola (Haiti and the Dominican Republic), and north of Jamaica and the Cayman Islands. Havana is the largest city and capital. Cuba is the third-most populous country in the Caribbean after Haiti and the Dominican Republic, with about 10 million inhabitants. It is the largest country in the Caribbean by area. Culturally, Cuba is considered part of Latin America.

Cuba was inhabited as early as the fourth millennium BC, with the Guanahatabey and Taíno peoples present at the time of Spanish colonization in the 15th century. Cuba remained part of the Spanish Empire until the Spanish–American War of 1898, after which it was occupied by the United States and gained independence in 1902. A 1933 coup toppled the democratically elected government of Carlos Manuel de Céspedes y Quesada and began a long period of military influence, particularly by Fulgencio Batista. In 1940, Cuba implemented a new constitution, but mounting political unrest culminated in the 1952 Cuban coup d'état by Batista. His autocratic government was overthrown in January 1959 by the 26th of July Movement during the Cuban Revolution. That revolution established communist rule under the leadership of Fidel Castro. The country under Castro was a point of contention during the Cold War between the Soviet Union and the United States, and the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 is widely considered the closest the Cold War came to escalating into nuclear war.

Fidel Alejandro Castro Ruz (13 August 1926 – 25 November 2016) was a Cuban politician and revolutionary who was the leader of Cuba from 1959 to 2008, serving as prime minister from 1959 to 1976 and president from 1976 to 2008. Ideologically a Marxist–Leninist and Cuban nationalist, he also served as the first secretary of the Communist Party of Cuba from 1965 until 2011. Under his administration, Cuba became a one-party communist state; industry and business were nationalized, and socialist reforms were implemented throughout society.

Born in Birán, the son of a wealthy Spanish farmer, Castro adopted leftist and anti-imperialist ideas while studying law at the University of Havana. After participating in rebellions against right-wing governments in the Dominican Republic and Colombia, he planned the overthrow of Cuban president Fulgencio Batista, launching a failed attack on the Moncada Barracks in 1953. After a year's imprisonment, Castro travelled to Mexico where he formed a revolutionary group, the 26th of July Movement, with his brother, Raúl Castro, and Ernesto "Che" Guevara. Returning to Cuba, Castro took a key role in the Cuban Revolution by leading the Movement in a guerrilla war against Batista's forces from the Sierra Maestra. After Batista's overthrow in 1959, Castro assumed military and political power as Cuba's prime minister. The United States came to oppose Castro's government and unsuccessfully attempted to remove him by assassination, economic embargo, and counter-revolution, including the Bay of Pigs Invasion of 1961. Countering these threats, Castro aligned with the Soviet Union and allowed the Soviets to place nuclear weapons in Cuba, resulting in the Cuban Missile Crisis—a defining incident of the Cold War—in 1962.

The Communist Party of Cuba (Spanish: Partido Comunista de Cuba, PCC) is the sole ruling party of Cuba. It was founded on 3 October 1965 as the successor to the United Party of the Cuban Socialist Revolution, which was in turn made up of the 26th of July Movement and Popular Socialist Party that seized power in Cuba after the 1959 Cuban Revolution. The party governs Cuba as an authoritarian one-party state where dissidence and political opposition are prohibited and repressed. The Cuban constitution ascribes the role of the party to be the "leading force of society and of the state."

The highest body within the PCC is the Party Congress, which convenes every five years. When the Congress is not in session, the Central Committee is the highest body. Because the Central Committee meets twice a year, most day-to-day duties and responsibilities are vested in the Politburo. Since April 2021, the First Secretary of the Central Committee has been Miguel Díaz-Canel, who has been serving as President of Cuba since 2018.

The Cuban Revolution (Spanish: Revolución cubana) was the military and political movement that overthrew the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista, who had ruled Cuba from 1952 to 1959. The revolution began after the 1952 Cuban coup d'état, in which Batista overthrew the emerging Cuban democracy and consolidated power. Among those who opposed the coup was Fidel Castro, then a young lawyer, who initially tried to challenge the takeover through legal means in the Cuban courts. When these efforts failed, Fidel Castro and his brother Raúl led an armed assault on the Moncada Barracks, a Cuban military post, on 26 July 1953.

Following the attack's failure, Fidel Castro and his co-conspirators were arrested and formed the 26th of July Movement (M-26-7) in detention. At his trial, Fidel Castro launched into a two-hour speech that won him national fame as he laid out his grievances against the Batista dictatorship. In an attempt to win public approval, Batista granted amnesty to the surviving Moncada Barracks attackers and the Castros fled into exile. During their exile, the Castros consolidated their strategy in Mexico and subsequently reentered Cuba in 1956, accompanied by Che Guevara, whom they had encountered during their time in Mexico.

The Cuban communist revolutionary and politician Fidel Castro took part in the Cuban Revolution from 1953 to 1959. Following on from his early life, Castro decided to fight for the overthrow of Fulgencio Batista's military junta by founding a paramilitary organization, "The Movement". In July 1953, they launched a failed attack on the Moncada Barracks, during which many militants were killed and Castro was arrested. Placed on trial, he defended his actions and provided his famous "History Will Absolve Me" speech, before being sentenced to 15 years' imprisonment in the Model Prison on the Isla de Pinos. Renaming his group the "26th of July Movement" (MR-26-7), Castro was pardoned by Batista's government in May 1955, claiming they no longer considered him a political threat while offering to give him a place in the government, but he refused. Restructuring the MR-26-7, he fled to Mexico with his brother Raúl Castro, where he met with Argentine Marxist-Leninist Che Guevara, and together they assembled a small revolutionary force intent on overthrowing Batista.

In November 1956, Castro and 81 revolutionaries sailed from Mexico aboard the Granma, crash-landing near to Los Cayuelos. Attacked by Batista's forces, they fled to the Sierra Maestra mountain range, where the 19 survivors set up an encampment from which they waged guerrilla war against the army. Boosted by new recruits that increased the guerilla army's numbers to 200, they co-ordinated their attacks with the actions of other revolutionaries across Cuba, and Castro became an international celebrity after being interviewed by The New York Times. In 1958, Batista launched a counter-offensive, Operation Verano, but his army's use of conventional warfare was overwhelmed by Castro's guerrilla tactics, and the MR-26-7 eventually pushed out of the Sierra Maestra and took control of most of Oriente and Las Villas. Recognising that he was losing the war, Batista fled to the Dominican Republic while military leader Eulogio Cantillo took control of the country. With revolutionary forces controlling most of Cuba, Castro ordered Cantillo's arrest, before establishing a new government with Manuel Urrutia Lleó as governor and José Miró Cardona as prime minister, ensuring that they enacted laws to erode the power of the Batistanos.

The Moncada Barracks were military barracks in Santiago de Cuba, Cuba named after General Guillermo Moncada, a hero of the Cuban War of Independence. On 26 July 1953, the barracks was the site of an armed attack by a small group of revolutionaries led by Fidel Castro. That day a simultaneous attack was carried out on the Carlos M. de Cespedes Barracks in Bayamo directed by Raúl Martínez Ararás by order of Castro. The attack failed and the surviving revolutionaries were imprisoned. This armed attack is widely accepted as the beginning of the Cuban Revolution. The date on which the attack took place, 26 July, was adopted by Castro as the name for his revolutionary movement, Movimiento 26 Julio (abbreviated as M-26-7), which eventually toppled the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista on 1 January 1959.

Ernesto "Che" Guevara (14 May 1928 – 9 October 1967) was an Argentine Marxist revolutionary, physician, author, guerrilla leader, diplomat, politician and military theorist. A major figure of the Cuban Revolution, his stylized visage has become a countercultural symbol of rebellion and global insignia in popular culture.

As a young medical student, Guevara travelled throughout South America and was appalled 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 in Mexico City, Guevara 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 dictator Fulgencio Batista. Guevara soon rose to prominence among the insurgents, was promoted to second-in-command, and played a pivotal role in the two-year guerrilla campaign which deposed the Batista regime.