The Granma, designed for a dozen passengers, carried 82 armed revolutionaries from Mexico and ran aground in mangrove swamps miles from its intended landing point. Batista's forces, tipped off, ambushed the exhausted rebels days later, killing or capturing most of them. Fewer than 20 survivors, including Fidel and Raúl Castro and Che Guevara, escaped into the Sierra Maestra mountains to rebuild what would become the force that toppled Batista in 1959.
The expedition was cursed from the start. The Granma left Mexico two days late and badly overloaded, its 82 passengers and their weapons pushing the small yacht so low in the water that it took on seawater constantly. Seasickness was near-universal; Che Guevara later wrote that the entire crossing felt less like a military expedition than a shipwreck in progress.
They landed at Playa Las Coloradas not on schedule but two days behind it, missing the planned diversionary uprising in Santiago that was supposed to draw Batista's troops away. Instead they waded ashore through mangrove swamps that shredded their boots and gear, exhausted and disoriented, straight into a government ambush at a place called Alegría de Pío. Of the 82 who landed, scholars estimate only 15 to 20 made it to the mountains. That ragged remnant—including two Castro brothers and an Argentine doctor named Ernesto Guevara—spent the next two years building a guerrilla army from almost nothing, and by January 1959 they had taken Havana.
Key people: Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, Raúl Castro