Castro answers government propaganda on Radio Rebelde

Government troops again tried to penetrate the rebel zone as Operation Verano weakened.

Rebel resistance prevented the government army from recovering the initiative in the Sierra Maestra.

Government forces attempted to trap Castro’s main force in the final major battle of the summer offensive.

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.

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.

The columns of Che Guevara and Camilo Cienfuegos moved across difficult terrain while pursued by government forces.

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.