Eighty-Two Against an Army

On November 25, 1956, Fidel Castro and 81 fighters sailed from Mexico on a leaky yacht called the Granma, bound for Cuba. The landing was a fiasco. They arrived late, in the wrong spot, and walked straight into an ambush. Only a dozen or so men escaped into the Sierra Maestra mountains. It was the worst possible start to a revolution.

From that wreck of a beginning, Castro spent two years building a guerrilla army in the hills. By January 1959 it had toppled the dictator Fulgencio Batista. The revolution won less by force of arms than by collapse: Batista's regime was hollowed out by corruption and had lost the people long before it lost the fight.