The inertia and incapacity of the bourgeois political parties to oppose the military regime -even some of those parties joined the regime in one way or another- was in sharp contrast with the belligerence of the popular sectors, especially with that of the young generation which had just been born to political life.

From its ranks a movement of new type was born and at its head was Fidel Castro (Birán, 1926), a young lawyer who had performed his first political activities within the University and the Orthodox Party. Advocating a new strategy of armed struggle against the dictatorship, Fidel Castro devoted himself to the silent and tenacious preparation for the struggle to come.

Actions would start on July 26, 1953, when army garrisons Moncada in Santiago de Cuba, and Carlos Manuel de Céspedes in Bayamo were simultaneously attacked in an action meant to become the trigger for a vast popular insurrection.
	The Moncada was the little engine that put into motion the big one.

The operation failed and was followed by the mass assassination of dozens of participants in the attacks who had been taken prisoners during and after combats. The survivors, among them Fidel Castro, were sentenced to long prison terms. During the trial, the young revolutionary leader delivered a bright self-defense allegation -later known as History Will Absolve Me- in which he argued the right of the people to uprise against the tyranny and explained the causes, ways and objectives of the struggle they had planned to carry out. This allegation would become the program of the revolutionary struggle.

Meanwhile, the dictatorship was facing a critical situation because of the dramatic drop of sugar prices in the world market and of the formula of reducing production. To reduce the effects of the depression, the government started the compulsive mobilization of financial resources most of which would end up in the personal bank accounts of the regime members. Despite the introduction during the previous decade of new production items, the Cuban economy, yoked by sugar, could not develop satisfactorily. Proof of it was the huge masses of unemployed and subemployed that by the middle of the 50s they would represent a third of the total work force in the country.

However, by 1954 the tyranny intended to legalize its status by spurious elections that at least would serve to placate the bloody repression. Such circumstance was used by the mass movement, which in 1955 had significantly increased its pressure to obtain the liberation of political prisoners -including the participants in the Moncada Garrison attack- and made workers strikes, particularly in the sugar industry sector. That same year the Movimiento Revolucionario 26 de Julio (26th of July Revolutionary Movement) is created by Fidel Castro and his comrades, and a year later the Directorio Revolucionario (Revolutionary Directorate) by the most combative university students.

The unhappy politics of promotions, the stimulus for enthroning nepotism, the favoritism, the flattery and the lack of technical and professional preparation of some of the principal heads and officials of the Army, constituted elements that influenced in the decision of a group of officials -with academic preparation- to conspire for improving the professional level of the institution. These officials called "Puros" could be located mainly in the Military Camp of Columbia, the Fortress of San Carlos de la Cabaña, and in military academies. Among these officials, José Ramón Fernández, José Orihuela, Enrique Borbonet, Ramón Barquín, Manuel Varela Castro stood out. An accusation caused the detention of all plotters and the abortion of the seditious attempt.

Another fact that worried the Batista regime was the assault to the Domingo Goicuría Barracks on April 29 1956. Around 12:00 o'clock approximately 50 men attacked and tried to occupy the "Goicuría" barracks. The immense majority of combatants were military men of the Authentic Organization (OA) and they were under the command of Reinold García. The action was a firm failure because Batista military knew that combatants would attack; the evidence is in the balance of the action: 17 dead attackers without any wounded, while the Army did not have any casualty. The assault to this barracks, headquarters of the Regiment Not. 4 of the Rural Guard, in Matanzas, constituted an element that stimulated to intelligence and repression bodies to act with more energy and, in particular, to disjoint, neutralize, and not to underestimate the groups of plotters belonging to the Authentic Organization.

Once the possibility of any legal struggle against the tyranny was recognized as impossible, Fidel Castro travels to Mexico with the purpose of organizing an expedition to start the revolutionary war. On the other side, the opposing bourgeois parties were rehearsing another operation to make a compromise with Batista trying to find a "political" solution to the situation, but their failure would end up plunging them into disrepute.

On December 2 1956, Fidel Castro landed at the head of the Granma expedition in Las Coloradas, Oriente province.
	The landing of the Granma's expeditionaries initiated the guerrilla struggle in the mountains on December 2, 1956.

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