Museo de la Revolución

This guide to the Museo de la Revolución in Havana, once Cuba's presidential palace, follows two attempts to overturn the same government. It opens with the Granma, a leaking cabin cruiser built for twelve that carried eighty-two men, including Fidel Castro and a young Ernesto Guevara, on a rough weeklong crossing from Mexico in November nineteen fifty-six that ended in a mangrove swamp and an ambush. It also revisits March thirteenth, nineteen fifty-seven, when student revolutionaries stormed these same stairs after President Fulgencio Batista, who lived and worked in this building. Look for the bullet holes beside the staircase, left unpatched on purpose.