Rebel columns begin the westward campaign

Rebel manoeuvres and negotiated pauses enabled the guerrillas to escape the attempted encirclement. Batista’s offensive ended in failure.

Fidel Castro ordered Cienfuegos’s Column 2 to advance westward, echoing Antonio Maceo’s nineteenth-century liberation campaign.

He argued that the failed summer offensive showed the revolution had spread beyond the Sierra Maestra and could not be destroyed militarily.

The order assigned Column 8 to carry the war from the Sierra Maestra into central Cuba and coordinate revolutionary forces there.

Che Guevara was instructed to cross Cuba, unite forces in Las Villas and disrupt the island’s main transport routes.

Peasant delegates discussed land, roads, schools and political participation, linking agrarian demands to the armed struggle.

In liberated territory the law granted land rights to many tenants and sharecroppers, anticipating the wider reform of 1959.

Column 8 arrived in central Cuba and began coordinating with other anti-Batista forces despite political differences.

The broadcast told rural Cubans that the Rebel Army had begun changing land relations before national victory.

A wartime transmission connected scattered columns and informed listeners about the widening rebel campaign.