Essay About Fidel Castro And General Fulgencio Batista Y Zalvidar

In 1979, the National Council of the Cuban

After graduating from the School of Law of the University of Havana in 1950, Fidel Castro began to practice law. He joined the Cuban People’s Party, sometimes called the Ortodoxos, and was their candidate for the Cuban House of Representatives in the Havana district for the June 1952 elections.

In March 1952, General Fulgencio Batista y Zalvidar overthrew current government of President Carlos Prĭo Socarrġs. In a previous 1933 revolt, Batista organized a coup that overthrew a provisional regime under Carlos Manuel de Cĩspedes. Cĩspedes’ government had replaced the dictatorship of Gerardo Machado y Morales. Up until 1944, Batista established a strong and efficient government in Cuba. He cultivated army support, civil service, and organized labor. Ruling through associates between 1930 and 1949, he was then elected president in 1940. He retired from office in 1944 to travel, and then settled in Florida.

In the next eight years after Batista’s retirement, there was a resurrection of corruption in Cuba’s government. Batista then led a second military revolt in March 1952, where he was widely accepted as a hero and savior of the people under and oppressive government. However, his second term in power was vastly different from his first one. After coming back into power, Batista promptly canceled the June 1952 elections and proclaimed himself the dictator of Cuba. This second term where he ruled as a dictator was marked by corruption, brutal leadership, jailing of many political opponents, and methods of ruling that bordered on being terroristic. Batista took control of the University of Havana, the press, and the Congress. Embezzlement became a huge problem, as Batista guzzled huge quantities of his funds from Cuba’s elevated economy. These funds made Batista himself even richer, while he also sent money to his close cabinet, heads of state, and other associates.

On July 26, 1953, Fidel Castro led an unsuccessful attack on Batista’s forces at Santiago de Cuba. Santiago de Cuba was an army post and military barracks. He led about 160 men against the Moncada Barracks, where they were largely outnumbered. The operation was almost doomed to failure. Eventually, almost all of his men were killed, and Castro himself was arrested. He acted as his own defense lawyer in his trial, where he conducted an “impassioned defense.”

Castro gained many supporters from his speech entitled “History Will Absolve Me.” During his trial for his involvement in the July attack on the Moncada Barracks, he made this speech defending his actions and criticizing the new government under Batista. To Castro, it seemed that former-President SocarrДЎs and General Batista were ruining Cuba and that the idea of the Republic was indeed a joke, as the rulers were violating the Constitution that made it a Republic; he spoke openly about this in his speech. Another part of his speech protested the sentence he was facing: usually the crimes that he was being acquitted of would give him a three to five year prison sentence, but under Batista’s influence on the courts, he was stuck facing a possible 26 year sentence. He spoke of how he and eight other young men with no military experience (naming all but two who were neither dead nor imprisoned) plotted the attack at Santiago de Cuba. However, his general passion was what gained him the most support. As he wrote:

“I warn you, I am just beginning! If there is in your hearts a vestige of love for your country, love for humanity, love for justice, listen carefully. I know that I will be silenced for many years; I know that the regime will try to suppress the truth by all possible means; I know that there will be a conspiracy to bury me in oblivion. But my voice will not be stifled – it will rise from my breast even when I feel most alone, and my heart will give it all the fire that callous cowards deny it.”

Despite his passionate defense, Castro was sentenced to fifteen years in prison. Two years later, however, in 1955, Fidel was pardoned in a political amnesty. After being released from prison, he and his brother RaДєl were exiled to Mexico. There, they continued to campaign against the second Batista regime. In Mexico, Castro found overwhelming support in many other Cuban exiles living in Mexico, who he used to form the 26th of July movement group: a revolutionary group opposed to Batista’s regime in Cuba. In Mexico, Castro also became friends with Ernesto “Che” Guevara, who later became one of Castro’s closest advisors and generals in his attempts to take Cuba.

The Castro-Guevara Agreement, by the 1950s, was based on the premise that Fidel would give up the rule of law, and that his revolution would be carried out in Mexico with absolute force, subject to constitutional guarantees, with direct democracy. But on the other side was the US–supported Ruling Council, which supported the political development of the two Cuban dissident leaders, including Ernesto ‰¹ (Guidance against Cuba), a staunch supporter of democratic values of the Cuban Revolution and a supporter of Latin American socialism, whose first message was his opposition to the use of force for domestic internal security. In 1958, Castro became president, and with him the International Commission for Human Rights.

In a landmark case in 1979, the Commission’s decision, which was ratified in 1975; the International Court of Justice (ICJ); and the International Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, a US-supported court in Yugoslavia ruled the Cuban government would not be able to impose a national death sentence or impose the death penalty to his ex-wife. This decision set out its principles. The ICJ decided to uphold those principles for the first time since World War II, in 1979, but did so with more conciliatory language aimed at avoiding the Cuban threat: The case involved a mother who was kidnapped on 23 March 1986 in Bagaón, a city at the front of the Cuban military invasion. The mother and her five children had escaped from a prison guarded by Cuban police, and after several days of search they discovered an elderly man, a man who they said had not been detained. They found him. A week later, on 20 February 1986, armed Cuban soldiers took the three children and began to beat them with wooden batons of paper. The infant was taken into custody. He was shot in the head and had another bullet lodged into his arm. He was severely burned and his father died two days later, in Havana. The woman was released and buried in the rubble. The ITC also determined Cuba had failed to take measures to prevent human rights violations within the Cuban regime. Cuba did so while providing Cuba–US economic and security aid and financial support.

This decision has not been fully vindicated by the ICJ, given the fact that a major international body, the UN, held several key panels for human rights and against torture testimony. In 1985, the UN General Assembly endorsed the use of force by the President for internal security in a resolution, calling its review of alleged torture ”

On December 2, 1956, armed men from the 26th of July movement landed on the coast of Cuba from a yacht. All 81 men who went on this expedition were killed or captured except for Castro, his brother Raĺl, Che Guevara (who agreed to come on the expedition as a doctor), and nine other men. The few men that were not apprehended by Batista’s forces or killed fled to the Sierra Maestra region in southwestern Cuba. They proceeded to gather more forces across the island and employ guerrilla warfare tactics against Batista’s forces. To gain more support around Cuba, Castro began to employ propaganda efforts, and internal political support of Batista had already wavered significantly since his return to power. With more support, Castro’s forces were able to win a string of victories over the government’s poorly led forces. As Batista was able to gather less political support and Castro’s forces grew, defeating his military more, Batista was forced to flee Cuba on January 1, 1959. At this point in time, Castro had over 800 guerrillas under his control, while they were able to defeat Cuba’s provisional army force of 30,000 trained men.

Upon Batista’s flee from Cuba,