Before Night Falls

In 1952 Fulgencio Batista led a US-backed military coup d’état after it became clear that he would not win the presidential election. The US government provided Batista with military, financial, and logistical support because of his anticommunism and favorable attitude toward American companies in Cuba. After he took power, Batista outlawed the Communist Party, severely restricted civil liberties, and allied himself with the wealthy owners of sugar plantations.

Over the following years, Batista’s policies widened wealth inequality and fomented unrest among the middle and lower classes. Arenas’s peasant family became even poorer under Batista and were forced to sell their farm to survive. As Batista became increasingly unpopular, numerous guerrilla revolutionary groups formed against him. Fidel Castro’s July 26 Movement (named after the date of its 1953 attempt to overthrow Batista) became the leading revolutionary movement.

The leaders of the revolution, Castro and Che Guevara, and their guerrillas captivated an international audience who watched on TV as the bearded guerrillas fought Batista. The revolution seemed made for the new age of TV and the budding countercultural movement in the US As historians Nancy Stout and Tony Perrottet argue,

Cuba’s was “the perfect revolution” for the visual media age that kicked off in the 1950s: it was short; it was successful; it unfolded in neat stages—“like an operetta”—and yet with the

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