9781422279786

Camilo Cienfuegos, a 23-year-old former art student; and Ernesto “Che” Guevara, an Argentinian medical doctor. All would play leading roles in Cuba’s revolution. For his part, Fulgencio Batista didn’t regard the ragtag bunch that had escaped into the mountains as a threat to his regime. He declined to order troops to pursue and mop up the revolutionaries. “No one survives in the Sierra Maestra,” he scoffed. A Society Divided Batista’s confidence would ultimately prove unwarranted. At the time, however, there seemed little reason to believe Fidel Castro was anything but inept as a revolutionary leader. And, on the surface at least, Cuban society did not appear to be fer- tile soil in which to germinate a popular uprising. By the mid- 1950s, Cuba ranked among Latin America’s most prosperous nations. It had a large, well-educated, and thriving middle class. Overall, Cubans enjoyed a high degree of social mobility, a rar- ity for Latin America. However, the benefits of prosperity were unevenly shared, accruing mainly to city dwellers and to large rural landowners. Many peasants lived in desperate poverty. “Urban Cuba,” notes Mark Falcoff, an American scholar of Latin America, “had come to resemble a Southern European country (with a living standard as high or surpassing that of France, Spain, Portugal and Greece) while rural Cuba replicated the conditions of other plantation societies in Latin America and the Caribbean.” But discontent had begun to percolate even among Cuba’s flourishing urban middle class. Increasingly, Cubans who were

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Cuba Under the Castros