Original subtitles

[in Spanish] Cuba has always been fighting for its freedom.

[in Spanish] A hundred thousand died

and even though we lost the war, the country had changed.

There is little question that Meyer Lansky had thoroughly corrupted Batista.

It's not a lie, they didn't promise anything.

They promised a revolution. They did a revolution.

[in Russian] These guys were bound to become

either martyrs or national heroes.

...una revolución.

-[announcer] Fidel Castro. -[applause]

He told Khrushchev, "You should unleash the entire Soviet nuclear arsenals."

Apocalypse.

[siren blares]

[in German] Cuba will never bend its knee.

[narrator] Lush forests, a blue ocean, and sunny, tropical weather.

Cuba has been a favorite vacation spot since at least the 1920s.

Tourism picked up tremendously in the 1930s,

as people, especially from the United States,

were drawn also by Cuba's low prices and plentiful liquor.

How did this almost magical island become the playground of the American Mafia?

What turned Fidel Castro, a Jesuit school-boy,

into the leader of an armed rebellion?

And why did all of Cuba's ambitious political reforms fail within a decade?

Cuba's history is marked by 500 years of poverty and oppression.

But the Cubans have never given up on their dream of freedom.

Since 1934, Cuba has been ruled by a number of puppet governments,

under the control of General Fulgencio Batista.

He was a non-commissioned officer before taking power in a military coup.

He had Cuba's largely white army officers of Spanish descent removed.

For the first time, Cuba was ruled by someone of native descent.

[in German] Initially, Batista was a highly regarded man on Cuba.

Not only by most people in general, but especially among informal networks

of clients, friends and families. He was very much accepted by them.

As the head of the army, Batista ran the country from behind the scenes.

The elected presidents were his puppets.

Cuba's neighbor, the United States, saw in him a strong man

who could restore peace and quiet to Cuba.

Batista developed policy in agreement with the American ambassador.

[in Spanish] He was a young man who had grown up in poverty.

He was not even 31 years old,

and he had sold himself to the US ambassador.

He had turned himself over and betrayed his country.

Cuba is barely 90 miles from the American coast.

Washington's political elite were surprised by Batista's coup d'état.

It took some time for them to come to terms with him.

US corporations had invested heavily in Cuba's agriculture,

especially its sugarcane.

Their interests had to be preserved.

To the surprise of many, General Batista bade farewell to his uniform in 1940,

in order to run for president of Cuba.

The former military dictator decided to run on a platform

that promised prosperity for all Cubans.

[in German] And he did it, too! He built a new army,

mainly from the colored lower classes.

This is the moment when the sons and grandsons of former slaves

move up the social ladder. It's the rise of the Afro-Cubans.

And then Batista does the same with the police, too.

As a candidate in the presidential election,

he strove to implement the promises made during the 1933 revolution.

The United States warned Batista against continuing the reforms,

but Cuba's intellectuals supported him.

[in German] They wanted to bring change to Cuban politics.

That's why many intellectuals and writers got involved with politics

and helped create the constitution of 1940.

Batista's crowning achievement was to give Cuba a new constitution.

It allowed a land reform, established women's suffrage,

and cemented the eight-hour work day.

[in French] The 1940 constitution was regarded, at the time,

as one of the most democratic constitutions in Latin America.

The reason for this is that it finally fulfilled the promises

that had been made during the revolution of 1933 already

and guaranteed workers' rights.

Fulgencio Batista brought together both conservative and leftist factions.

This allowed him to unite the majority of Cubans behind his banner

and be elected in the autumn of 1940.

This was a period of significant prosperity in Cuba.

It was a period of a lot of happiness,

because Cubans saw that the revolution had finally come to power.

Cuba became a paradise for new ideas.

The whole population was to benefit from the flourishing economy.

Politicians in Washington were concerned.

For them, Batista's reforms were socialist and communist pipe dreams.

But many Americans discovered Cuba as a vacation destination

just off their coast.

[in German] Since the advent of prohibition in the United States,

Americans came to Cuba to drink.

The first waves of tourists in the 1920s and '30s

saw this relationship blossom.

Everything that was seen as tropical, luxurious, and a bit disreputable

happened in Cuba, not in the United States.

Prohibition in the USA, from 1919 to 1933, made Cuba

and turned Cuba into one of America's best-kept tourist secrets.

Life here was cheap and alcohol flowed freely and legally.

While official relations between Cuba and the United States flourished,

America's organized crime also set up shop on the island.

During prohibition, they smuggled liquor from Cuba to the mainland.

The FBI tried to counter these smuggling treks with films such as this one.

Smuggling liquor in oil cans.

It was almost like if you knew the series Boardwalk Empire,

it really was coming in on boats and ships and things like that,

and sometimes they would float, the barrels would float on the shore.

Sometimes they were picked up properly,

loaded off of docks and then put into warehouses.

Cuba was at the heart of rum production.

To this day, the former headquarters building of rum giant Bacardi

is a Cuban landmark.

Caribbean rum promised freedom and adventure.

Whereas it once was the drink of choice of sailors and pirates,

Cuba's rum had now been discovered by tourists.

The Cubans began mass production.

The basic raw material was at hand, and manufacturing was inexpensive.

Cuban rum was a worldwide success.

[in Spanish] Bacardi was Cuba's largest rum producer,

and they distilled sugarcane.

The company was located in eastern Cuba, especially in Santiago.

Bacardi became very powerful through its position as market leader.

The Bacardi family was originally from Catalonia in Spain.

They perfected the recipe for rum in Cuba.

The bat on the company's logo is an old Cuban symbol of good fortune.

Rum became a staple drink in the most famous bars of the world,

where revelers mixed it with Coca-Cola,

making the world's most famous long drink: the Cuba Libre.

[in German] It was basically rotgut. Only the lower classes drank it.

It took time and advertising to make it popular in the normal world.

In the 1920s and '30s, Bacardi opened factories

in Barcelona, New York and San Juan in Puerto Rico.

The family business became the best-known Cuban company of all time.

Rum is part of Cuba as much as its cigars, the sea, and its many small fishing boats.

It was part of the attraction for an American journalist

who came to Cuba to fish, but ended up staying.

Ernest Hemingway.

Even today, for many visitors, he embodies the Cuban way of life:

at one with nature, enjoying life, and with a sharp tongue.

[in Spanish] Hemingway's relationship with Cuba

had a lot to do with the sea.

When he came to Cuba for the first time, it was to fish in the Gulf of Mexico,

but he soon found it was a good place to live.

Hemingway spent many years in Cuba.

The island notably inspired Hemingway's most famous work,

a novella about an elderly Cuban fisherman.

"The Old Man and the Sea" won Hemingway the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954.

[in Spanish] When he won the Nobel Prize for this novella,

he dedicated it to the Cuban people.

He was thankful because Cuban fishermen had allowed him

to live among them as a foreigner,

and had inspired him.

In the 1930s, it was not hard

for a tourist such as Hemingway to settle in Cuba.

Writers such as he were welcome.

Ordinary jobs, however, were primarily reserved for Cubans,

and the island no longer welcomed immigrants.

In May 1939, the steam liner MS Saint Louis,

carrying hundreds of refugees from Hamburg, Germany,

arrived in Cuba, seeking asylum.

The MS Saint Louis was a ship full of Jewish refugees

that left Hamburg and was going to come to the United States.

President Franklin Roosevelt refused to accept those refugees,

so they went to Cuba and they tried to negotiate with the Cuban government,

which was led at that time by Batista and another general named Benitez,

and tried to pay for each refugee.

The Cuban government demanded such exorbitant sums

that only a few refugees were able to pay.

More than 900 Jewish passengers were forced to return to Europe.

Many of them would be killed during the Holocaust.

[in German] Other ships met with similar fates,

but only the Saint Louis was turned away in this cruel manner.

She is one of very few ships

that didn't find a safe haven anywhere in the Caribbean.

Some ships went to the Dominican Republic, and passengers settled in Sosua.

Others found refuge in Venezuela or Colombia.

The Saint Louis was the only ship to be turned away by Cuba,

because there were already so many immigrants there.

Much like the United States before it, Cuba forbade access to its territory.

The immigrant era was over.

At the beginning of World War II,

Cuba's position in the Caribbean made it strategically very important,

both as a central shipping hub and for the US Navy.

Merchant liners and warships sailed from Cuba to cross the Atlantic.

When the US entered the war in 1941, Cuba sided with its powerful neighbor,

joined the anti-Hitler coalition, and supported US troops as a supply base.

[Suchlicki] Well, they were in Guantanamo and they were in the Isle of Pines.

The American Navy visited Cuba,

and Cuba provided sugar and other goods to the United States,

so it was a close relationship, yes.

Cuba's president, Fulgencio Batista,

made an official visit to his American ally.

President Franklin Roosevelt welcomed him with all due ceremony.

Reservations about Batista's previous links to the Communist Party

appeared to have been forgotten.

[Suchlicki] Batista had the support of the United States.

He collaborated with the United States during World War II.

This is the period of the war.

The communists who couldn't ally themselves

with the more leftist, progressive elements

allied themselves with Batista.

This was a time also that the United States and the Soviet Union

became allied against Nazi Germany.

Cuba benefitted from its usefulness to the American military machine

and its economy prospered.

Part of the profits were invested in upgrading Cuba's own armed forces.

Batista himself profited from the arms trade.

He acted as an intermediary for armament industrialists

and took a cut of each purchase his army made.

[in Spanish] By this time, he was already a millionaire.

He knew how to dress, how to obey and how to rule.

[in German] This was basically unofficial social policy for personal advancement.

It was widely expected that someone in power

would provide for their families and friends.

Many people in Cuba were provided for, and the president more than anyone else.

Cuba's coastline is studded with grand hotels,

most of which were built by the Mafia in the 1940s.

The Americans opened gambling in Cuba in a number of hotels

as tourism began to increase.

The Mafia took over some hotels,

not any different than Chicago or Las Vegas,

so Cuba was another spot where the Mafia controlled the gambling business.

Many tourists complained about cheating in the casinos.

Batista was apparently unable to control the gambling bosses.

The problem with cheating was terrible in Havana.

You had people rigging games.

They had little devices

that they could stop wheels from spinning in a certain way.

That was a real problem,

because in the short term, of course, it attracted degenerate gamblers,

but in the long term, it offended people

who really wanted to have an honest game.

Batista wanted to stop fraud in the casinos.

To put an end to cheating, he hired a notorious Mafia figure.

Meyer Lansky began in Cuba

not really as a casino owner but as a consultant,

that he received a fee for running the games honestly.

Meyer Lansky was a respected figure for both the Italian and Jewish Mafia,

with a reputation of being fair in business and ruthless with cheats.

Lansky cleaned up Cuba's casinos and hotels

and brought them in line with his US business interests.

Stricter gambling rules were imposed, hotels prospered,

profits flowed in, and Lansky took his cut.

There were a lot of American businesses that were already successful in Cuba:

the sugar business, the telephone business.

But the mob really focused on travel and tourism and casino gambling.

Look, Cuba was one, close to the United States,

received significant tourism.

Batista protected, during his period,

protected the Mafia and the gambling.

So the Mafia did well, prospered,

and had a nice vacation place near Miami

to go and spend winters.

Thus, with the blessing of President Batista,

Cuba became an El Dorado for the Mafia in the 1940s.

Huge profits, no police hassles, and an ideal money-laundering machine.

Cuba was very attractive to the mob because it was legal.

There was not much they could do in the US that was legal

because you had to follow the money, you had to trace money.

But the mob could go into Havana

and build casinos and hotels perfectly legally.

Now, the money that was used was not obtained legally in the US,

but what was literally happening is people with duffel bags of cash

would go into Havana and buy hotels and casinos.

Among those investing in Cuba early on

was also the United States' most feared Mafia boss,

Charles "Lucky" Luciano, head of the famous Cosa Nostra.

In 1936, the FBI had managed to arrest Luciano for forced prostitution.

But his friend and confidant Meyer Lansky hatched a plan to get Luciano out again.

With the United States at war with both Germany and Italy,

the US government feared sabotage and spies, especially in New York Harbor.

And they knew the docks were controlled by Luciano's Italian associates.

[ship's horn blares]

The US Navy brought in Meyer Lansky,

and Meyer was able to convince Lucky Luciano, who was in prison,

to urge Italians to cooperate and keep their eyes open on the waterfront.

What was in this for Lucky Luciano, who was in jail doing 30 to 50 years?

Well, Meyer had a plan

and the plan was if Luciano cooperated with the war effort

by giving the order to go and help find Nazi spies

and to help find loyal people in Sicily for when General Patton invaded,

maybe Luciano would be let out of jail.

The condition for Luciano's release was simple.

He had to cooperate

and would be deported to his native Italy at the end of the war.

In 1940, future revolutionary leader Fidel Castro was 14 years old.

He and his brother Raúl

were the illegitimate children of a wealthy Cuban land owner.

Their father had sent them to attend a church-run private boarding school

in Santiago de Cuba.

[in Spanish] Fidel Castro and Raúl Castro studied in a Jesuit school, as did I.

Being a Jesuit is not about being Catholic or going to mass on Sunday.

It's a way to understand the world and to project yourself into the world.

It was an all-boys school.

Fidel is standing to the right, with a pencil in his mouth.

[in French] Among the Jesuits, Castro was known

as an athlete, as a sportsman.

He was manly and imposing.

He was bent on being very physical.

His competitive spirit was initially channeled into sports,

baseball and basketball, which suited him perfectly.

[in Spanish] He always had a temper like Michael Jordan in basketball.

Highly competitive.

Fidel was a very rebellious student.

He had a couple of guns in his dormitory.

He used to fight with other students.

As a teenager, Fidel already stood out.

He couldn't stay still and was quick-tempered,

but he did well in class.

In 1944, Batista's four-year term as president came to an end.

He withdrew from politics, traveled through Latin America,

and settled in Florida, where he lived a life of luxury.

It was here, in 1945, that he celebrated victory in World War II

with his American friends.

Back in Cuba, Batista had been succeeded by Ramón Grau,

his former co-revolutionary.

But the new president did little to stop organized crime.

The Mafia ruled freely, reaping huge profits,

and extending a power-base founded on corruption.

In Chicago, New York and Las Vegas,

the mob bosses were wanted men, and Cuba was their safe refuge.

The other guys are in Havana, raking in millions and millions and doing well

and everybody's happy and everyone's getting fat

and everyone's getting fed.

They're building up Havana and it's beautiful

and they're expanding, and they're saving monuments,

and this and that, and the beaches are beautiful.

In order to restructure the Mafia after the war,

Meyer Lansky called a meeting of all leading families

in December 1946 in Cuba.

They were to gather at Havana's famed Hotel Nacional.

Around 100 guests attended.

The bosses of Mafia families,

the most influential gangsters from the USA and Europe.

Under Cuba's tropical sun,

they were seeking to solve, without bloodshed,

their disagreements on sharing out the loot.

The Havana conference was about figuring out

what the rules were going to be going forward,

who was going to be in charge.

Frank Costello.

Albert Anastasia.

Sam Giancana.

Santo Trafficante.

Meyer Lansky managed to bring together every big name in the underworld.

Including the biggest of them all, Charles "Lucky" Luciano.

After settling in Sicily just ten months prior,

Luciano smuggled himself to Havana on a freighter.

His goal was simple:

to take over organized crime in the United States once again.

[Dezenhall] A lot of what Luciano wanted to establish in 1946

in the Havana conference was what his role would be.

And the way he did that was by being kind of a diplomat,

bringing in mob families in the United States,

in order to figure out what their investments would be in Havana,

what their investments would be in Las Vegas, which was just getting started.

That meeting, uh...

I believe, was to just keep everything in check,

so things would go on smoothly. So it was like two governments.

You had the government of the United States,

the government of the world,

and, as Meyer used to say,

"We were not the underworld, we were the overworld."

The conference lasted for a week and was accompanied by lavish entertainment.

Ostensibly, the reason for many attendees to come to Havana

was to see Frank Sinatra perform.

Sinatra, however, was only in Havana on the express invitation

of several Chicago mobsters.

Throughout the conference,

Cuban police steered clear of the Hotel Nacional.

The government and civil servants were all party to shady dealings.

Luciano set himself up, at least for a while, in Cuba.

What ended up happening, though, is gossip columnists began writing

about him and Frank Sinatra and planeloads of prostitutes coming in to Havana.

And the Truman administration was extremely upset by this

because they felt that they had been slapped in the face.

It was one thing to deport Luciano to Italy,

it's another thing if he's a few miles from Florida,

basically still being the boss.

Only under US pressure did Cuban authorities relent

and pressure Luciano to leave Havana,

going into exile for a second and last time.

So he ultimately was sent back to Italy if for no other reason

than to take heat off of the Mafia

because nobody is loyal to anybody when they create a lot of controversy.

And Luciano was able to do

almost as much as he could do from Italy that he could do from Havana,

but not even Meyer Lansky wanted him in Havana after a while.

Since then, Cuban slang has special words

for its corruption practices.

"Botella" and "chivo."

Botella is a form of nepotism,

whereby positions are appointed to friends and acquaintances,

who are then supposed to return the favor later on.

[in German] And chivo basically means creating a phony administrative job,

where somebody is paid to do nothing.

This creates an overpaid elite, which contributes nothing to society.

It was common practice.

It was expected, and Cubans saw it as part of the political culture.

A small elite of high-ranking soldiers,

and particularly American company bosses and their partners,

were the big winners in post-war Cuba.

For the rest of the people, prospects were grim.

Income disparity increased dramatically and Cuba's poor were getting poorer.

[in Spanish] Six hundred thousand people were unemployed back then,

out of seven million Cubans.

It was shameful. It was a disgrace.

They said Cuba was the number-three country in Latin America.

I can't imagine how bad the others were.

In the late 1940s, Fidel Castro began studying law at the University of Havana.

Well, law was a very common profession.

Law and medicine were the principal professions

that students studied in Cuba.

And he liked screaming

and that was a way to achieve political power.

In other words, being a lawyer was first before you become a political leader.

Universities were a hotbed of opposition

against the Cuban government and its corruption.

Groups with various affinities sprang up.

Among them were those who claimed allegiance

to socialists or to communists.

[in Spanish] At that time, we're talking about...

'52, '50...

the University of Havana was very big.

It was practically the only university in the country.

[in French] The University of Havana was a hotbed of activism.

It was the great period in Latin-American history

in which university was a sort of battlefield.

Fidel Castro joined several armed groups.

[in French] You have to understand something else as well.

In Latin-American society,

the image of a macho, of a pistolero,

is rather well regarded.

Castro found a place for himself in this culture,

which is quite natural

if you think of his fiery temperament

and his will to become involved in politics.

[in Spanish] Castro was one

among many student leaders.

He had the reputation of being a gangster.

[in French] He's very fond of this period in his life; it's very important to him,

because he discovered the art of organizing his troops,

of forming a clan, of surrounding himself with men.

Gradually, during his time at the University of Havana,

he became a real political leader.

In 1947, a revolt was fomenting on Cuba's neighboring island.

The Dominican Republic was being ruled by a ruthless dictator.

The revolt's organizers sought support

among the rebellious students of Havana University.

So Fidel Castro and a group of students

went to a little cay, a little island off the coast of Cuba, Cayo Confites,

to train to use machine guns and Molotov cocktails and grenades

to go and fight.

The group of students around Fidel Castro

was stopped by soldiers and never reached the Dominican Republic.

In 1948, shortly after the Dominican affair,

Castro left Cuba for the first time, and traveled to Bogotá, Colombia.

One reason was to get away from Cuban authorities for a while,

who had grown suspicious of Castro.

Once in Colombia, he realized that the country had the same problems as Cuba.

[in French] These were turbulent times in Latin America.

Castro joined a delegation of university Cuban students.

They were caught up, not by chance,

in what almost turned into a revolution in Bogotá, Colombia.

A liberal presidential candidate in Colombia's upcoming elections

had been murdered.

His supporters took to the street, weapons in hand.

Over 600 people were killed in the ensuing riots.

Fidel Castro, as well as other Cuban students, were in the thick of things.

After ten hours of violence, government troops put down the uprising.

Once again, there was no revolution for Fidel Castro.

[in French] He comes back, with a little bit of aura

of having been there, of someone daring.

Castro's will to fight was unbroken, despite these revolutionary setbacks.

Having graduated, he set up a legal practice,

defending the poor in court.

But once again, his endeavors failed.

[in German] For a long time, even during his university days,

and even though he was very charismatic, Castro was seen as a perpetual loser.

This is definitely part of his story. He was a man who always lost,

and whom others regarded as being just one among many losers.

He was seen as a man who, despite his utopian dreams,

would never amount to much.

As a lawyer, Castro was a failure because he did not invoice his clients.

This did not stop him, however, from making big plans

in his private life. He wanted to get married.

[Díaz-Balart] So, he met my sister

at the university; she was studying philosophy

and he was studying law.

They were young, of course, you know, like, so they met.

In 1948, Fidel Castro married Mirta Díaz-Balart.

Her wealthy father paid for a lavish honeymoon in New York.

[in French] Fidel Castro married Mirta Díaz-Balart.

She was from a very well-to-do family.

He could have become part of Cuban high society.

[in Spanish] Fidel married the daughter

of Batista's future minister of the interior.

He was practically Batista's right-hand man.

The new family soon found themselves in conflict

over their private and political lives.

The thought of my family or my father

was that he was a revolutionary, you know,

that it would be very hard for her to live,

and that was true.

In 1952, former president Fulgencio Batista

decided to return to Cuba.

He wanted to run for the presidency again,

and thus renew his political career.

How poor Cubans lived after the war

can be seen in the 1964 feature film Soy Cuba.

The lifestyle of Batista and his cronies was considerably different.

Mafia boss Meyer Lansky raised substantial amounts of money

for Batista's election campaign.

The FBI regarded Lansky as one of America's most influential gangsters.

He himself always claimed to be an honest casino owner.

They were places that were patronized by the finest people

and had seating capacities, some of them, as high as 800 people.

And some of the finest people of the United States

patronized these places.

Also, your big charity balls were held there.

And usually every year, the proms from that area were held there.

Their fathers and mothers.

There were not any nooks in some corner or somewheres.

They were known all over America for their food and entertainment.

There is little question that Meyer Lansky had thoroughly corrupted Batista,

that he received millions and millions of dollars every year

to let the mob do their thing.

He was their partner, and he was able to put away a lot of money

in Switzerland and other places.

Batista's return proved to be more complicated than expected.

Forecasts for the election were uncertain.

It appeared that Batista was on the verge of a loss.

Batista was still well connected with Cuba's army,

as well as other influential Cubans.

They had invested their money in Batista,

but now it seemed that only a new coup d'état

could guarantee his rise to power.

[in Russian] When he was the legitimately elected president of Cuba

from 1940 to 1944,

all the communists and the left-wing groups supported him.

But after World War II, when the Cold War started,

he allied himself with the United States.

He oppressed all left-wing forces,

and, naturally,

became the enemy of all revolutionaries.

In 1952, the Cubans were ready for a new election

and they expected a new election.

Batista decided from Daytona, with his military friends,

that he was going to take over power, that he wouldn't be elected.

He was not popular in Cuba, so he wouldn't be elected.

[in Spanish] Batista launched a coup d'état

because he was not going to be elected.

He was afraid that the Orthodox Party would win.

Their program was to cleanse Cuba of corruption.

Their motto was "honor against money."

They stood for purity,

so Batista did not want the Ortodoxos to take power.

Three months before the presidential elections,

Batista took power in an almost bloodless military coup.

His contacts within the army helped him become Cuba's head of state once more.

Cuba's liberal constitution,

which he himself had introduced a few years previously, was swept aside.

His plans to take power were not only widely known beforehand,

many Cubans welcomed the coup.

[in German] Nobody lifted a finger. Nobody did anything.

Not even the communists.

There was some protest, and a few newspaper articles.

But no significant social group did anything

because everyone was so fed up with the previous governments.

People said, "At last, we have someone who will bring order to this chaos!"

The previous years had been marked by scandal and corruption.

But many Cubans saw Batista as a man of morals,

even though he made Mafia boss Meyer Lansky his minister for gambling.

Batista claimed to want to discipline democracy in Cuba.

Major festivities were organized to rally the Cubans to his cause.

[in Spanish] Batista did everything he could to legitimize his rule.

He never appointed ministers from the military.

Both ministries dealing with military aspects were headed by civilians.

He never wore a uniform.

He wanted to be accepted by the people.

All democratic process was ignored,

while the size of Cuba's police force was increased dramatically.

Batista no longer had political ideas.

Any opposition was violently repressed.

Thus began the Batista dictatorship.

[in German] And thus, he drifted into ruling as a dictator,

as a bloody, terrorist dictator.

[in Spanish] And then, in a fit of testosterone,

a lot of young people, like me, rose up against Batista.

Not in a political sense, but because of a feeling of utter humiliation.

"This man, because he has a gun

and the support of the army, can do what he wants."

The Mafia was still doing business, but the major investors had gone.

Even the US army no longer invested in Cuba.

The country deteriorated.

After 1953, Cuba was a police state.

Arrests were often arbitrary, as were torture and assassination.

To terrorize the people,

the police dumped their victims' corpses from moving vehicles.

At least 2,000 people died due to police brutality.

Fidel Castro, working as a lawyer in Havana,

filed a suit against Batista's coup d'état,

as it was unconstitutional.

The courts rejected his case.

Given the fact that in 1944 he allowed elections,

many people expected him to stay in power for a short time and then have elections.

But as time went by, they realized that he wasn't going to have elections,

that he wanted to remain in power and retain power,

and then that's when the opposition began to develop.

[in Spanish] We took to the streets to protest against Batista.

We didn't belong to any party.

We were young students,

but we knew from our relatives and parents

that Batista's government was harmful, bad for the people.

Having exhausted what he saw as all legal options,

Fidel Castro decided that only armed rebellion

could put an end to Batista's regime.

Today, the Moncada Barracks in Santiago is a museum.

In 1953, it was Cuba's second-biggest military base.

Fidel Castro put together a small group of revolutionaries

in order to attack the barracks.

[in French] What's so fascinating about Castrism

is that when we look at how events unfolded,

it was always improvised, and a bit amateurish.

It was all a bit crazy

and the attack on the Moncada Barracks is a prime example of this.

The ambitious plan was to seize the barracks and the weapons within.

[in Spanish] We had planned to, and we thought we could,

take the barracks by surprise.

The date was set for July 26th, 1953.

The Moncada Barracks was a fortress in the heart of Santiago.

Across the street from it was a civil hospital.

Castro divided his men,

some to storm the hospital, in order to create a diversion,

allowing the rest of his troops to take the barracks.

[in Spanish] The plan was to be on top of the hospital

and fire on the barracks from there.

This was supposed to draw

the soldiers' fire

and allow our comrades

to mount a frontal attack.

While carnival festivities were in full swing around Santiago,

Castro's men approached the barracks.

[in French] They had chosen to do it during Carnival.

Why? Because they only had about 150 men,

and they thought that, during Carnival,

the soldiers in the barracks

would be drunk and less organized.

But things went bad almost immediately.

[in Spanish] Unfortunately, something went wrong.

When the first of our cars arrived,

they were surprised by a patrol we had not counted on being there.

They set off the alarm.

While Cubans were dancing and laughing in the streets,

Castro and his men pressed their attack.

But the barracks' guards opened fire almost immediately.

Castro and his men were outnumbered and outgunned.

[in Spanish] We were shooting the whole time.

The moment of surprise was gone,

so we fired until we ran out of ammunition.

19 soldiers were killed, as were six rebels,

before Castro and his remaining men surrendered.

For the young lawyer turned rebel, it was another devastating defeat.

[in German] In 1953, who was Castro? A madman.

Don Quixote. The Don Quixote of liberty.

Fifty-five rebels were killed on the spot after being arrested.

Only a few managed to escape.

Most, including the Castro brothers, were put on trial.

No one expected a fair hearing.

Castro's revolution had been annihilated

and now the state wanted to show its power.

The day after the attack,

Fulgencio Batista visited the Moncada Barracks

and asked to see the weapons that had aimed to topple his regime.

Another battle for Cuba's freedom had been lost...

but the war was far from over.

COMMANDER IN CHIEF AT YOUR COMMAND

WE WILL ACHIEVE WHAT WE SWORE TO DO IN BARAGUÁ