The band included Fidel’s brother Raul, Ernesto “Che” Guevara and Camilo Cienfuegos.Īt the helm of the Granma was Norberto Collado Abreu (below), a Cuban Navy veteran and strong supporter of Fidel and his plan to bring socialism to the island home they shared. He had been imprisoned for political activity and had used his time to sharpen his political understanding reading Marx, Engels, Lenin as well as South American anti-imperialist writers.Īlso on the Granma were other revolutionaries who would play their part in the liberation of Cuba and its people. She had been designed to accommodate just a dozen passengers and crew.įor this momentous cruise, there were 82 members of the revolutionary group the 26th of July Movement.Īt the head of this small but gallant band was a Cuban lawyer who had recently been released from jail. The little ship was seriously overcrowded. She set sail for the thousand-mile voyage across the dangerous waters of the Gulf of Mexico. The name was taken from the motor yacht of that name which delivered Fidel Castro and 81 other freedom fighters to the mafia-controlled island of brothels and gambling casinos that was 1950s Cuba.Īt this time, this Caribbean island had become a cesspit of a holiday destination for rich Americans with all the trappings of a place run by organised crime and their puppet the dictator Fulgencio Batista.Īt two in the morning on November 25 1956, a 60-foot, 20-odd year-old, rattling and rusting motor yacht slipped out of the Mexican port of Tuxpan, Veracruz. The official Communist Party newspaper in Cuba was, and still is, called Granma. The man who tweaked Uncle Sam’s beard and built an island of socialism just 90 miles from the coast of the USA. TODAY progressive thinkers across the world are mourning the death of Fidel Castro.

As the world mourns for Fidel Castro, PETER FROST looks back to when a curiously named yacht arrived on a Cuban beach.

Yate granma