During the 1950s, two wealthy brothers named Fidel and Raul Castro, along with their Argentinian medical doctor Che Guevara Lynch, upturned the entire Western hemisphere. Whole industries, where Americans had spent tens of millions of dollars on gambling or prostitution, were suddenly wiped out. Hundreds of thousands of Cubans fled the advent of Castro’s regime – transforming the political, cultural, and social landscape of Southern Florida forever. Public executions were carried out. The Soviet Union gained a staunch ally ninety miles from the coast of the United States. Untold numbers of Cubans lost everything they owned. A few years later, Castro’s foreign policy very nearly inaugurated World War III. And it all started with a ragtag group of workers led by the sons and daughters of Cuba’s wealthy elite. It wasn’t the poor of Cuba who instigated the Revolution – there were more children of poverty fighting for Batista’s corrupt regime. No, it was the idle children of the rich who upturned a nation – and the entire balance of world foreign relations. This is their story.

It’s all here and it’s all free on Battlecast – the world’s foremost podcast on war and its sociopolitical impact.

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Maps and Illustrations

References

Cuba: the pursuit of freedom by Hugh Thomas (1971)

The Cuban Revolution, 25 years later by Hugh Thomas

Cuba Libre!: Che, Fidel, and the improbable revolution that changed world history by Tony Perrottet

Che: A revolutionary life by Jon Anderson (1997)

Cuba: A new history by Richard Gott

Cuba from Columbus to Castro by Margot Williams and Josephine Mcsweeney

History of Cuba: The challenge of the yoke and the star by Jose Canton

The Cuban Revolution by Robert Goldston 

Fidel Castro speaks by Fidel Castro

Episodes of the Revolutionary War by Ernesto Che Guevara

History will absolve me by Fidel Castro

Fidel Castro speeches by Fidel Castro

Revolutionary struggle 1947-1958 by Fidel Castro

A revolution can only be born through culture and ideas by Fidel Castro

My early years by Fidel Castro

Nothing can stop the course of history by Fidel Castro

Che Guevara and the Cuban revolution: writings and speeches of Ernesto Che Guevara by Ernesto Che Guevara

Venceremos! The speeches and writings of Ernesto Che Guevara by Ernesto Che Guevara

Young Castro: The Making of a Revolutionary by Jonathan Hansen

Raúl castro: un hombre en Revolución by Nikolai Leonov  

The fourth floor: an account of the Castro Communist Revolution by Earl Smith

El jefe del Pelotón Suicida by Larry Morales

Inside the Cuban Revolution by Julia Sweig