Cuban Revolution
Castro ousts Batista and the island allies with the USSR
Guerrillas led by Fidel Castro and Che Guevara overthrew the dictator Fulgencio Batista and entered Havana on 1 January 1959. Cuba became the first socialist state in the Western Hemisphere and a Soviet ally off the US coast.
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Meanwhile around the world (±25 years)
Whole world
- 1939–1945 World War II — 20 years earlier
- 1947–1991 Cold War — 12 years earlier
- 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights — 11 years earlier
- 1949 Founding of NATO — 10 years earlier
- 1980 Smallpox declared eradicated — 21 years later
Europe
- 1936–1939 Spanish Civil War — 23 years earlier
- 1941–1945 The Holocaust — 18 years earlier
- 1953 Discovery of the DNA double helix — 6 years earlier
- 1957 Treaty of Rome — 2 years earlier
- 1961 Berlin Wall built — 2 years later
Eastern Europe & Russia
- 1941–1944 Siege of Leningrad — 18 years earlier
- 1942–1943 Battle of Stalingrad — 17 years earlier
- 1945 German surrender and Victory Day — 14 years earlier
- 1957 Sputnik 1, the first satellite — 2 years earlier
- 1961 Gagarin's flight — 2 years later
Middle East
- 1948 Founding of the State of Israel — 11 years earlier
- 1979 Iranian Revolution — 20 years later
- 1980–1988 Iran–Iraq War — 21 years later
Africa
- 1956 The Suez Crisis — 3 years earlier
- 1958 Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart — 1 year earlier
- 1960 Year of Africa — 1 year later
- 1963 The Organisation of African Unity is founded — 4 years later
- 1967 First human heart transplant — 8 years later
Asia
- 1945 Atomic bombing of Hiroshima — 14 years earlier
- 1953 First ascent of Everest — 6 years earlier
- 1955–1975 Vietnam War — 4 years earlier
- 1958–1962 Great Leap Forward — 1 year earlier
- 1975–1979 The Khmer Rouge and the Cambodian genocide — 16 years later
Oceania
- 1936 Death of the last thylacine — 23 years earlier
- 1941 Attack on Pearl Harbor — 18 years earlier
- 1942 The Battle of Midway — 17 years earlier
- 1954 The Castle Bravo test at Bikini — 5 years earlier
- 1959 The Antarctic Treaty — same year
Alive at the time
- Winston Churchill (aged 85)
- Pablo Picasso (aged 78)
- Charlie Chaplin (aged 70)
- Mao Zedong (aged 66)
- Nelson Mandela (aged 41)
- Martin Luther King Jr. (aged 30)
- Neil Armstrong (aged 29)
- Yuri Gagarin (aged 25)
- Harry S. Truman (aged 75)
- Anna Akhmatova (aged 70)