page_title: La Cabaña
section_title: Land redistribution
hierarchical_section_title: La Cabaña / 1959 / Land redistribution
caption_attribution_description: English: Che Guevara visiting Gaza Strip during 1959
context_page_description: Fortaleza de San Carlos de la Cabaña, colloquially known as La Cabaña, is an 18th-century fortress complex, the third-largest in the Americas, located on the elevated eastern side of the harbor entrance in Havana, Cuba. The fort rises above the 200-foot hilltop, along with Morro Castle.
context_section_description: Along with ensuring "revolutionary justice", the other key early platform of Guevara was establishing agrarian land reform. Almost immediately after the success of the revolution, on 27 January 1959, Guevara made one of his most significant speeches where he talked about "the social ideas of the rebel army". During this speech he declared that the main concern of the new Cuban government was "the social justice that land redistribution brings about". A few months later,n 17 May 1959, the Agrarian Reform Law, crafted by Guevara, went into effect, limiting the size of all farms to 1,000 acres (400 ha). Any holdings over these limits were expropriated by the government and either redistributed to peasants in 67-acre (270,000 m²) parcels or held as state-run communes. The law also stipulated that foreigners could not own Cuban sugar-plantations.
  On 12 June 1959, Castro sent Guevara out on a three-month tour of 14 mostly Bandung Pact countries (Morocco, Sudan, Egypt, Syria, Pakistan, India, Sri Lanka, Burma, Thailand, Indonesia, Japan, Yugoslavia, Greece) and the cities of Singapore and Hong Kong. Sending Guevara away from Havana allowed Castro to appear to distance himself from Guevara and his Marxist sympathies, which troubled both the United States and some of the members of Castro's 26 July Movement. While in Jakarta, Guevara visited Indonesian president Sukarno to discuss the recent revolution of 1945-1949 in Indonesia and to establish trade relations between their two countries. The two men quickly bonded, as Sukarno was attracted to Guevara's energy and his relaxed informal approach; moreover they shared revolutionary leftist aspirations against western imperialism. Guevara next spent 12 days in Japan (15–27 July), participating in negotiations aimed at expanding Cuba's trade relations with that country. During the visit he refused to visit and lay a wreath at Japan's Tomb of the Unknown Soldier commemorating soldiers lost during World War II, remarking that the Japanese "imperialists" had "killed millions of Asians". Instead, Guevara stated that he would visit Hiroshima, where the American military had detonated an atom-bomb 14 years earlier. Despite his denunciation of Imperial Japan, Guevara considered President Truman a "macabre clown" for the bombings, and after visiting Hiroshima and its Peace Memorial Museum he sent back a postcard to Cuba stating, "In order to fight better for peace, one must look at Hiroshima."
  Upon Guevara's return to Cuba in September 1959, it became evident that Castro now had more political power. The government had begun land seizures in accordance with the agrarian reform law, but was hedging on compensation offers to landowners, instead offering low-interest "bonds", a step which put the United States on alert. At this point the affected wealthy cattlemen of Camagüey mounted a campaign against the land redistributions and enlisted the newly-disaffected rebel leader Huber Matos, who along with the anti-Communist wing of 26 July Movement, joined them in denouncing "Communist encroachment". During this time Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo was offering assistance to the "Anti-Communist Legion of the Caribbean" which was training in the Dominican Republic. This multi-national force, composed mostly of Spaniards and Cubans, but also of Croatians, Germans, Greeks, and right-wing mercenaries, was plotting to topple Castro's new regime.
caption: Guevara visiting the Gaza Strip in 1959
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