Juan Almeida Bosque accompanied Fidel Castro in his organization of the necessary war against Fulgencio Batista´s dictatorship which came to power after a coup d’état of March 10, 1952.
Almeida was the president of the Association of Combatants of the Revolution from its founding until his death. The association is made up of more than 300,000 Cubans spanning several generations who have taken part in revolutionary struggles and internationalist missions. These include the revolutionary war in the 1950s, the fight against the U.S.-organized counterrevolutionary attacks that followed, the mobilization of volunteer combatants to aid national liberation struggles in Angola and other countries in Africa and Latin America from the 1960s to the 1980s, and the teachers and medical personnel working in Venezuela, Haiti, and other countries today.
Almeida was part of a rebel contingent in what became one of the opening battles of the Cuban Revolution—the July 26, 1953, attack on the Moncada military barracks in the city of Santiago de Cuba. En route to battle, one of the cars of his contingent got a flat tire and he had to give up his space, preventing him from participating in the fighting. However, as the combatants retreated he was able to link up with them as they regrouped in the mountains. The combatants and Almeida were captured some days later, sent to prison, and released in 1955 following a national amnesty campaign.
