Congress of Peasants in Arms meets in rebel territory

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.

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

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.

The opposition rejected elections conducted amid civil war and repression. Andrés Rivero Agüero was declared the winner.