Batista fled Cuba on January 1, 1959, a week before Castro

Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista fled the country in the early hours of January 1, 1959, flying to the Dominican Republic with a group of supporters as Fidel Castro’s rebels advanced. It was his second spell in charge: Batista had dominated Cuba as a soldier-strongman from 1933 to 1944, then seized power again in a 1952 coup.

The revolution’s victory is often told as a single day of jubilant crowds. In fact the handover took a week, and U.S. diplomatic papers, published by the State Department’s Office of the Historian, let us follow it almost day by day.

The first week

• January 1: Batista leaves before dawn. The State Department’s own summary blamed the “general deterioration of his position” and the rebels’ recent military successes.
• January 2: Castro names Manuel Urrutia Lleó, a judge, as provisional president.
• January 5: Urrutia reaches Havana and installs himself in the presidential palace.
• January 6: American business leaders in Havana tell the U.S. embassy that Washington should recognise the new government as fast as possible, “preferably before arrival of Castro in Habana”, expected on Thursday, January 8.
• January 7: The Secretary of State asks President Eisenhower for authority to recognise the provisional government “without delay”, judging that it “appears free from Communist taint”.
• January 8: Castro himself reaches Havana after a long victory march from the east of the island, a day after Washington’s recognition memo.

The optimism in those cables evaporated fast. Castro took the premiership himself on February 16, 1959, and Eisenhower soon decided that the new leader was a “madman” who had to be removed. In 1960 the CIA began training Cuban exiles in Guatemala for the invasion that Kennedy would inherit. Within four years of Batista’s flight, Soviet missiles on the island had brought the world to the brink, a crisis Kennedy revealed in a televised address in October 1962.