1959: Batista forced out by revolution

History.com has this for 1 January:

On this day in 1959, facing a popular revolution spearheaded by Fidel Castro’s 26th of July Movement, dictator Fulgencio Batista fled the island nation. Amid celebration and chaos in the capitol of Havana, the US debated how best to deal with the radical Castro and the ominous rumblings of anti-Americanism in Cuba.
The American government had supported Batista, a former soldier and Cuban dictator from 1933 to 1944, who seized power for a second time in a 1952 coup. After Castro and a group of followers, including the South American revolutionary Che Guevara (1928-1967), landed in Cuba to unseat the dictator in December of 1956, the US continued to back Batista. Suspicious of what they believed to be Castro’s leftist ideology and worried that his ultimate goals might include attacks on the US’s significant investments and property in Cuba, American officials were nearly unanimous in opposing his revolutionary movement.
Cuban support for Castro’s revolution, however, grew in the late 1950s, partially due to his charisma and nationalistic rhetoric, but also because of increasingly rampant corruption, greed, brutality and inefficiency within the Batista government. This reality forced the US to slowly withdraw its support from Batista and begin a search in Cuba for an alternative to both the dictator and Castro; these efforts failed.
On 1 January 1959, Batista and a number of his supporters fled Cuba for the Dominican Republic. Tens of thousands of Cubans (and thousands of Cuban-Americans in the US) celebrated the end of the dictator’s regime. Castro’s supporters moved quickly to establish their power. Judge Manuel Urrutia was named as provisional president. Castro and his band of guerrilla fighters triumphantly entered Havana on 7 January 1959.
The US attitude toward the new revolutionary government soon changed from cautiously suspicious to downright hostile. After Castro nationalized American-owned property, allied himself with the Communist Party, and grew friendlier with the then-Soviet Union, America’s Cold War enemy, the U seveSred diplomatic and economic ties with Cuba and enacted a trade and travel embargo that remained in effect untl recently. In April of 1961, the US launched the Bay of Pigs invasion, an unsuccessful attempt to remove Castro from power. Subsequent covert operations to overthrow Castro, born on 13 August 1926, failed and he went on to become one of the world’s longest-ruling heads of state. Fulgencio Batista died in Spain at the age of 72 on 6 August 1973. In late July of 2006, an unwell Fidel Castro temporarily ceded power to his younger brother Raul. Fidel Castro officially stepped down in February 2008.

Rico says he's still hoping to get there...