On March 10, 1952, Cubans had awakened to the news that Fulgencio Batista, a former president and a candidate with little hope of victory in an upcoming presidential election had taken over the government by force. Batista's coup d'etat shattered Cuba's fragile democracy -- and the political aspirations of a young lawyer named Fidel Castro.


Fidel Castro was the son of a wealthy farmer. He was educated in one of Havana’s exclusive Roman Catholic schools, the College of the Marian Fathers. He had been the only voice which dared condemn publicly Batista’s military coup d’etat of 1952, three months before national elections. In fact, four days after the coup and ten days before the United States officially recognized the dictator that lone voice went on record at one of Cuba’s highest civil courts, indicting the tyrant and asking for a public trial. Castro had been running for congress as member of a political party called El Partido Ortodoxo.


Most Cubans were stunned, but at the University of Havana, traditionally a political hotbed, conspiracies abounded. Castro began preparing an armed revolt. "One night, he was at the steps of the university," writer Norberto Fuentes recounted. "No money, no job, and he does not know what to do...and that's when he decides to attack the Moncada Garrison."


Fidel Castro persuaded university student leaders to provide him with machine guns and some ammunition they kept for emergencies, and safely hid them at his sister's home in Havana. Painstakingly, he began to gather supporters -- two hundred young Cubans in one year, all members of Partido Ortodoxo.


For nearly a year the young rebels trained without disrupting their normal activities in and out classes, jobs, homes, restaurants, stores, and in the middle of a busy modern city. They were students, workers, young professionals, teachers, artists, clerks. Some were poor, a few were rich, and most of them were sheltered sons and daughters of middle class families. The majority worked in Spartan clandestinely, a few with the knowledge and silent admiration of their trembling parents.


They sold their books and jewelry, they took extra jobs and mortgaged their cars, properties, businesses, until they raised fifteen thousand dollars with which to purchase guns and uniforms. They had no outside help, no offers of support from powerful individuals, organizations, or foreign land. So meager was their arsenal that when time came for the uprising many anxious and well-trained partisans had to be left behind for lack of weapons.


On the evening of July 24, 1953, Fidel's men (and two women) boarded two buses and left Havana for Santiago de Cuba with the excuse of attending the carnival. The group gathered at a farm near Siboney beach, twenty minutes from the city. There Castro informed them, for the first time, of the details of his plan. Approximately one hundred and fifty young attackers, including Castro's brother, Raúl, armed mostly with .22 caliber hunting rifles and the few weapons Castro had earlier retrieved from the university, would assault the Moncada Garrison and take over the adjacent Palace of Justice, a nearby hospital and a radio station. They would proclaim a manifesto: a return to democracy and the ideals of opposition politician Eduardo Chibás. Castro's goal was to rouse the people to insurgency, hoping that the army would join the people and force Batista from power. "Even if it failed," Fidel noted, "it would be heroic and have symbolic value."


On July 26, 1953, Fidel Castro led 120 people to attack Moncada Garrison. Moncada was the second largest military garrison in Cuba. At 5:00 a.m. a caravan of 16 cars left the farm at Siboney beach and slowly made its way toward Moncada. At the head of the caravan was Fidel Castro’s second in command Abel Santamaría. Santamaría's sister, Haydée, followed in the second car with her boyfriend Boris de la Coloma, who wore a new pair of two-tone shoes for the occasion. The attack was planned to be carried out at 5:15 a.m. Fidel Castro was not at the head of the caravan, but he was in the second car. Why? The reason is the following: the mission of the people that was in the first car was unarming the guards that were in the entrance of the garrison. The other cars had to get in the garrison and attack it. That was the plan. But, what happened?


Well then, Castro’s men unarmed the guards successfully, but in the same street there was a patrol of officers that noticed that the guards were being unarmed. They thought of shooting at the Fidel Castro’s men. As Castro was in the second car (he was driving, in fact), noticed that and the just thought of saving his partners immediately. He stopped the car and all the people got out and controlled the officers. As a consequence of that fact, the rest of the cars stopped behind Fidel Castro’s and thought that the building in front of them was Moncada Garrison. The building really looks like the garrison. So, they got in there and there was a terrible confusion. This happened because of no one of them was knew the city. Fidel Castro realized that his men had made a mistake, so he got in the hospital and the attack started again, but a lot of time had been lost and some men had shot. So, the soldiers waked up and the combat began. Unfortunately, the garrison could not be taken. Fidel Castro and his men had to abandon that place.


As in every revolution, the price is high. Half of the rebels died, not in combat, but under torture. Eight of the attackers were killed on the spot; another twelve were wounded. More than 70 were taken prisoner, including Raúl Castro. From an adjacent jail they were forced to hear the agony of their partners as they died under questioning. The detainees were brutally tortured, some even murdered, including Haydée's boyfriend Boris and her brother Abel. Haydée was taken prisoner, her brother's eye brought to her in prison the guards asked her to tell them everything about the movement, because if she did not, they would bring to her the other brother’s eye themselves and she bravely said: “if you took my brother’s eye and he did not even say a word, of course I won’t either”.


Castro's own account recalls a sergeant approaching him with a gun, but sparing his life with the words "ideas should not be killed." The sergeant was simply following orders: Castro's life had been guaranteed by Santiago's Catholic archbishop, Monsignor Pérez Serantes.


In Havana other student leaders accused Castro of irresponsibility and cowardice, but he didn't much care. At his trial the following September, the young lawyer, speaking in his own defense, called for the overthrow of Fulgencio Batista and for reforms to make Cuba a more just society. "All of Cuba," said Melba Hernández, who'd sewn the uniforms Castro the attackers, "had its eye on the trial" -- and on its dynamic defendant. Fidel readily admitted to leading the Moncada attack, and in the presence of the 100 soldiers guarding him in that courtroom, he accused Batista of a reign of terror and illegality which left the people no other course to liberation than a civilian uprising and, instead of asking for an acquittal, he closed his defense by demanding to be sent to join his brother-rebels already serving jail terms in the Isle of Pines prison, ending with these prophetic words: “You may condemn me, it does not matter. History will absolve me.” His judges handed down a stiff sentence: fifteen years in prison. Castro was sent to the Island of Pines, off Cuba's southwest coast, to serve his sentence. When released, he was forced into exile for his safety. In Mexico, he trained an army which he prepared for a guerilla war against Batista.


Fidel Castro's brother Raul explained the event: 'It was not a putsch designed to score an easy victory without the masses. It was a surprise action to disarm the enemy and arm the people, with the aim of beginning armed revolutionary action. It marked the start of an action to transform Cuba's political, economic and social system and put an end to the foreign oppression, poverty, unemployment, ill health and ignorance that weighed upon our country and our people.

When the attack on the Moncada Garrison was finally carried out, sixty-one rebels were killed in the fighting, and one third of the guerillas, including Fidel Castro, were captured. Half of the men captured were tortured to death. Although the assault failed, the Cuban people knew that there was an opposition against the Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista.

The date on which the attack took place, July 26, was adopted by Fidel Castro as the name for the revolutionary movement: 26th of July Movement (Movimiento 26 Julio or M 26-7) that would, in 1959, take power in Cuba.