Castro's Moncada Barracks Raid Was a Disaster. He Named the Cuban Revolution After Its Date.

On July 26, 1953, a 26-year-old lawyer led 160 young Cubans armed with hunting rifles against the island's second-largest army garrison. The attack collapsed in minutes, the army executed more than 50 captured rebels, and Fidel Castro was sentenced to 15 years. He served 22 months, named his movement after the date, and toppled the government before the decade was out.

Santiago de Cuba was still groggy from carnival when a caravan of 16 automobiles rolled toward the Moncada Barracks at dawn on July 26, 1953. The date was no accident. Fidel Castro had chosen it deliberately, timing the assault for the morning after Santiago's annual festivities, when the garrison would be slowest to react.

The plan: about 160 rebels in army uniforms would storm the Moncada Barracks, Cuba's second-largest military installation, seize its weapons and radio transmitter, and broadcast a call for national uprising against Fulgencio Batista, who had seized power in a coup 16 months earlier. Most of the rebels carried .22-caliber hunting rifles. They had one machine gun and not a single hand grenade.

It fell apart immediately. The caravan became separated in the departing carnival crowds. The car carrying the rebels' heavy weapons got lost and never arrived. When Castro's lead car reached the barracks gate at about 5:15 a.m., a sentry noticed something wrong and opened fire. The alarm sounded before anyone got inside. Within minutes the fight was over. Nine rebels died in the fighting; more than 70 were captured.

What happened next is what turned a fiasco into a founding myth. Over the following three days, Batista's soldiers executed more than 50 of the captured rebels, including Castro's second-in-command, Abel Santamaría, whose eye was later brought to his sister Haydée in her cell. The U.S. consul in Santiago reported that locals had regarded the attack as "something that only a fool would have attempted," but that the army's slaughter of survivors was what created "the Castro legend."

Castro himself escaped into the Sierra Maestra mountains before being captured days later, his life spared after the Catholic archbishop of Santiago intervened. At his trial, separated from the other defendants, the young lawyer defended himself and delivered the speech that would become the manifesto of his movement. He named José Martí as the "intellectual author" of the revolution, cataloged Cuba's poverty and corruption, listed five laws he would have proclaimed, and closed with words that still echo in Cuba: "Condemn me. It does not matter. History will absolve me."

He was sentenced to 15 years on the Isle of Pines. He served less than two. A popular amnesty campaign, led by the rebels' mothers, forced Batista's hand, and Castro walked free on May 15, 1955. He went to Mexico, met an Argentine doctor named Ernesto "Che" Guevara, and returned to Cuba in December 1956 aboard a yacht called the Granma with 81 men. Batista fled on New Year's Day, 1959.

Castro named his movement after the date of the raid: the 26th of July Movement, or M-26-7. The barracks where he was defeated was converted into a school and then, in 1978, into a museum. And July 26 is still a national holiday in Cuba, the Day of National Rebellion, a country that made a national holiday out of the date of a battle it lost.

Also on this day

• 1775. The Second Continental Congress appointed Benjamin Franklin the first U.S. Postmaster General, establishing a postal system from Maine to Georgia that became a communications lifeline of the American Revolution.
• 1847. Liberia declared independence, becoming the first republic on African soil, founded by formerly enslaved Black Americans through the American Colonization Society.
• 1882. Richard Wagner's final opera, Parsifal, premiered at the Bayreuth Festspielhaus, conducted by Hermann Levi, a Jewish conductor in the house of a notoriously anti-Semitic composer.
• 1947. President Truman signed the National Security Act aboard his presidential plane, creating the CIA, the National Security Council, and the modern framework of the U.S. national security state.