Cuban Revolution, 1953–1959

Abstract

In one sense, the Cuban Revolution is an event – the moment (on January 1, 1959) at which Fulgencio Batista, Cuba's dictatorial ruler, fled the country and a column of bearded young guerilla fighters took power in the capital, Havana. Yet a revolution is more than a seizure of power. It is that process, through time, in the course of which power is transferred from one social class to another. And that process is a continuum whose history begins with the stirring of new social forces and the earliest and perhaps unsuccessful challenges to the structures of the existing society.