Excerpts from Books and Wikipedia
"He landed on the southwest coast of Cuba at the end of 1956 with a force of just 80 men. . . . Most of them were killed or captured. A few, including Castro, his brother Raul, and Ernesto 'Che' Guevara, managed to escape to a hideout in the Sierra Maestra mountains, where Castro told them, 'Now we are going to win.' Improbably, he was right. The revolutionaries made effective propaganda use of their radio transmitter to attack the Batista regime and arouse sympathy for their cause abroad." [Furtado: 1001 Days] "Cuba was a Spanish possession until 1898 when, with U.S. help in the ten-week-long Spanish-American War, it achieved independence. Fifty years later, an American-backed dictator was fully in control, and by the 1950s Havana had become an American playground. The island was ripe for revolution, and in 1959 Fidel Castro’s insurgents gained control, thereby converting Cuba into . . . a client-state of the Soviet Union. Nearly a million Cubans fled the island for the United States, and Miami swiftly became the second-largest Cuban city after Havana. . . . In late 2014, encouraged by signs of reform in Cuba . . . the U.S. government announced the lifting of its embargo in a series of stages." [Geography: Realms, Regions, and Concepts, 17th Edition, p. 99-101]