spread unemployment I saw all around
me in Puerto Rico, most people seemed
to have work. This alone was enough to
impress me.”
Puerto Ricans organized to help
themselves, through such organizations as
Aspira (Aspire), founded in New York
City in 1961 by Dr. Antonia Pantoja to
improve educational opportunities for
Puerto Rican youths. It advanced this
goal through such means as scholarships,
financial aid, career and college counsel-
ing, educational advocacy, cultural activi-
ties, and community action projects. Now
a national organization with chapters in
several states and Puerto Rico, Aspira no
longer restricts itself to aiding Puerto
Ricans but instead serves all Latinos.
Other Puerto Rican groups used
activism to achieve their goals, such as the
Young Lords, a Puerto Rican student
activist group founded in New York City
in the 1960s. The Young Lords used
demonstrations and other forms of
protest to draw attention to the educa-
tional needs of young Puerto Ricans.
They succeeded in bringing about the
creation of Puerto Rican studies pro-
grams and student organizations at a
number of colleges.
As time passed, Puerto Rican
Americans in New York City developed a
sense that they belonged there. Some
came to call themselves Nuyoricans or
Neoricans, or Puerto Rican New Yorkers.
East Harlem, also known as Spanish
Harlem to New Yorkers of non-Hispanic
descent, became known to them as El
Barrio, the Neighborhood. The Lower
East Side became known as Loisaida.TURMOIL IN THE
CARIBBEANEven as Puerto Rico shone as a showcase
for democracy and economic develop-
ment, other places in the Caribbean were
rife with turmoil. In two of these nations,
Cuba and the Dominican Republic, polit-
ical upheaval brought new waves of
Hispanic immigration to the United
States. In the former, the depredations of
U.S.-supported dictator Fulgencio Batista
led to the Cuban Revolution, in which
Fidel Castro, in 1959, established the first
communist regime in the Western
Hemisphere. In the latter, the assassina-tion of dictator Rafael Trujillo in 1961
began several years of political turbu-
lence, peaking with U.S. military inter-
vention in 1965.The Cuban Revolution
Beginning with his involvement in the
uprising that overthrew President Gerardo
Machado in 1933, Cuban army officer
Fulgencio Batista y Zaldívar (1901–1973)
dominated his country for more than two
decades. He did so either indirectly
through puppet regimes or directly as
president (1940–1944, 1952–1958). He
ruled openly as a dictator from 1952.
Batista’s corrupt, repressive regime con-
centrated wealth in the hands of a small
elite, exacerbating the already desperate
situation of Cuba’s poor and alienating
the middle class. Nonetheless, Batista had
the full support of Cuba’s wealthiest fam-
ilies and of the United States, which
appreciated his anticommunist, probusi-
ness stance and his ability to maintain
order. Under his rule, Havana became a
center for gambling, drugs, and prostitu-
tion, controlled by organized crime cartels
from the United States.
The beginning of the end for Batista
came from an unlikely source: a wealthy
sugar-planter’s son named Fidel Castro
(1926– ). Trained by the Jesuits and the
holder of a law degree from University of
Havana Law School where he became
active in politics, Castro was moved by
the plight of Cuba’s poor and launched a
revolutionary attack on the Moncada
army base in Santiago on July 26, 1953.
The attack failed, and Castro went into
exile, but he returned in 1956 to begin a
sustained guerrilla campaign, the 26th of
July Movement. In what became known
as the Cuban Revolution (1956–1959),
Castro fought from his base in the Sierra
Maestra with forces that included Ernesto
“Che” Guevara (1928–1967), an
Argentine revolutionary who had trained
as a medical doctor before becoming
Castro’s chief lieutenant. Guevara would
later fight for leftist insurgencies in Africa
and Latin America before being executed
in Bolivia.
Supported by the peasantry and many
in the middle class, Castro made Batista’s
position increasingly untenable. In the
early hours of January 1, 1959, Batista
fled Cuba by plane. On January 8, Castro’s178 ATLAS OF HISPANIC-AMERICAN HISTORY
In this pro-Castro poster, Castro him-
self is shown lifting a rifle.(Library of
Congress)