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He sold his law books and car, recruited his brother Raul and 150-odd friends, raised $20,000 for guns and contraband army uniforms. At dawn on July 26. 1953, Fidel Castro led a column of 13 cars to the walls of Santiago's bristling Moncada barracks, a yellow stone pile where 1,000 Batista troops lay sleeping. A suspicious Jeep patrol came up. Castro, then 26, stepped out, raised his twelve-gauge shotgun and shot his first man. "That was the mistake," he recalls. "I had told them all to do what I did, and they all opened fire." The attack was stopped cold; Batista's cops rounded up and shot 75 of Castro's men. Intervention by church friends in Santiago saved the Castro boys.
Months in Solitary. Fidel's trial, on charges of leading an armed uprising, was all that a lawyer-revolutionary could ask. Rising for a three-hour oration, Castro described the attack in fearless detail, diagnosed Cuba's social ills—"The 900,000 farmers and workers, miserably exploited, with perennial work their only future and the grave their only rest." He denounced Batista's corruption and tyranny: "We were born in a free country, and we would rather see this island sink to the bottom of the ocean than consent to be anybody's slave." Concluding, he said: "I know that for me imprisonment will be harder than it ever was for anyone, but I do not fear it, as I do not fear the fury of the miserable tyrant who killed my brothers. Condemn me! It does not matter! History will absolve me!" The judge, unmoved, sentenced Fidel to 15 years. Raul to 13.
Fidel served seven months in solitary confinement on the Isle of Pines, passing the time by memorizing an English dictionary. His wife, whose father had become a Cabinet minister's aide, divorced him. Then Batista, cocky and prosperous, declared an amnesty in 1955 for political prisoners, including Castro.
Castro went to Mexico to recruit men and money. One summer evening in 1956, he stole across the Rio Grande near McAllen, Texas. Castro spent the next day in McAllen's Casa de Palmas Hotel with the richest Batista-hater of all: ex-President Carlos Prío Socarrás, 55, who had been bounced from office by the dictator's coup eight months before his term was up and began plotting so persistently that he is still under U.S. indictment for violating the Neutrality Act. "Here was the timber of a hero," said Pro. As President, Prío had grafted a fortune; he promised to back Castro with arms and cash.
Back in Mexico City, Castro, called on Spanish Colonel Alberto Bayo, onetime fighter against Franco. Said Castro: "You know all about guerrillas. You will teach us." Bayo sold his furniture factory, rented a big hacienda in the shadow of the volcano Popocatepetl, and taught hit-and-run warfare to 80-odd irregulars assembled by Castro.