Cuba 1952-1959 Interactive Timeline

We are pleased to bring you the interactive version of the Cuba 1952-1959 Timeline by Manuel Márquez-Sterling. This includes the key events from the 10 March 1952 coup that established the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista through the establishment of the Castros' replacement dictatorship, including the activities of Castro's M-26-7, other revolutionary movements (e.g. the DR and FEU) and of the Constitutionalist-Electoralist opposition to Batista. Click on the following link to open the timeline in a new window:
Cuba 1952-1959 Timeline

The timeline includes primarily events in Cuba, but also includes foreign events bearing directly on Cuba during that time, such as those concerning international press coverage of the Castro Revolution, US-Cuba policy, Cuban revolutionaries in exile, and Castro and his followers in Mexico.

We hope this Cuba History timeline will be useful to readers in building a contextual map of the individual historical events discussed at length in this blog, and as a quick reference tool to get a brief description for events of interest. The timeline provides information about individual events along with the big picture they piece together. By clicking on events on the timeline you will open a window with more information about that event, including links to further information.

Use the timeline viewer Zoom control to drill down and examine events in more detail, and getting a closer look at events of smaller importance which are not visible in high level views. The use of the Zoom control and the other timeline viewer features is explained in our Timeline Quick Start Guide. This will help in getting started if you’re not already familiar with this timeline viewer software. The Quick Start Guide post includes a link to our starter timeline which is simpler to start with than the richer and more detailed Cuba 1952-1959 Timeline.

We are giving consideration to also making available this timeline data in text form. We are especially interested to hear from readers about the form they find most useful and engaging for timeline data.


The software used to create the timeline is TimeGlider formerly Mnemograph. Though still in beta, we have found it a very useful data visualization tool.