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Coincidentally, Fidel Castro's death is exactly 60 years to the day since
he, Raul and 80 others set sail from Mexico to Cuba on the yacht Granma
on 25th November 1956.
The boat was only designed to carry 25 and the voyage took a week.
Within three days of landing, most of them were dead. Attacks from Baptista's
army resulted in only about twenty of the original 82 having survived.
Countless battles were to follow. So the odds of survival for one of the
original Granma expeditioners was not good.
Long before numerous CIA and mafia plots to assassinate him, Castro
had narrowly escaped the firing squad, had gone through imprisonment,
fought in the mountains and in the streets and chained-smoked his
way through his share of cigars.
Granma was later preserved and you can see it in a glass-walled building a
couple of blocks from Havana Harbor. It is under 24 hour guard.
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