So Jonathan, what, you know, maybe years ago, if people are trying to think of a family that was dealing with this as someone who was very, very poor, but how is it affecting the middle class now?

Like we've been talking about, Bill, I think, said it great.

It affects everyone.

This is not just a low income issue.

This is an issue that is putting a pinch on families across the board.

And it's really tough for a family to afford $4,000 worth of school lunches and school supplies.

And then on top of that, keep food on the table at home, pay the bills at home, keep a a roof over their head.

So how important is it to work with other organizations like Root & Rising?

But how is it affecting the middle class now?

Uh, like we've been talking about, uh, Bill, I think, said it great.

It affects everyone.

Um, this is not just a, um, a low-income issue.

This is an issue that is putting a pinch on families across the board.

Uh, and it's really tough for a family to afford $4,000 worth of, uh, school lunches and school supplies and then on top of that, keep food on the table at home, pay the bills at home, keep a, a roof over their head.

So not only are the school meals essential, but for those emergency situations, like Rooted and Rising help address in the community, uh, having an emergency food pantry system that is stocked with healthy and nutritious foods is, is vital to have.

So how important is it to work with other organizations like Rooted and Rising?

But Fidel has a plan.

So it's January 1st.

He makes a big speech in Santiago, and then he heads to Havana.

How does he go? Does he go by plane? It takes 45 minutes.

No, he basically walks, and he takes the entire country with him, and they just greet him yard by yard.

It starts in Oriente Province, and people come out, and he gets all of this adulation, and they take those people literally, and they go by foot to Havana, just fielding, fielding, fielding the enthusiasm and the uproar.

So that however many days later, when they arrive in the capital, the people are with him, at least for the time being.

The essential dynamics for the ensuing half-century of Cuban public life are set.

Frank País, the wonder kid of the underground resistance in Santiago, worries that although Fidel could win the war, right now, he's in no position to win the peace.

There is an interesting tension in this that, that all revolutions have, and that is there is the need to win the fight, the guerrilla war in this case, but there is also a need to build a political platform.

There's a lot of tension, tons, like, "Those guys up in the mountains, they're not doing anything right.

Those guys down in the llano, in the cities, they're not giving us any arms.

They're not doing anything we need." And then later, Frank País came up to the Sierra and said, "Fidel, cool your jets." Frank was saying, "We do not have a political platform capable of sustaining a revolution of this kind yet.

We are building it.

It takes time.

To some scholars, he is, at this time at least, being sincere.

Jonathan Hansen is senior lecturer at Harvard University and the author of Young Castro: The Making of a Revolutionary.

He was from a dirt poor family.

Things were so bad for his family in Spain that he took his chances and returned to Cuba thinking that there would be a lot of opportunity to make a life for himself amid all the rebuilding that would have to be done after the war.

First, he worked as a contractor, cutting down forests, carting sugarcane, working for the big planters in eastern Cuba.

He made a business for himself.

He bought an inn for himself, and then eventually was able to buy a sugar plantation and then expand it so that eventually he commanded a sugar plantation of 42 square miles in some of Cuba's most valuable cane-growing farmland.

So it's an unusual story of literal rags to riches.

Mirta's father was a kind of pro-Batista guy, and Batista sends them a wedding gift.