The fall of Cuba’s Batista government, after six years of fighting between government forces and Castro’s revolutionary army, was officially complete when Castro and his soldiers captured Havana on January 8, 1959.
Wild scenes of celebration ensued, as Castro’s army were hailed as liberators throughout the city. Law professor José Miró Cardona had created a new government with himself as prime minister and Manuel Urrutia Lleó as president on January 5, and the United States had officially recognized this new government two days later. Upon Castro’s arrival in Havana, he was appointed Commander-in-Chief of Cuba’s Armed Forces.
A month later, Miró suddenly resigned, and on February 16, 1959, Castro was sworn in as Prime Minister of Cuba.
At appoximately 1AM on February 3, 1959, Holly, Valens and Richardson (’the Big Bopper’) boarded a plane in Clear Lake, Iowa, intending to fly to their next concert, in Moorhead, Minnesota. The three, flown by pilot Roger Peterson, were killed a short time later when their plane crashed.
The major cause of the crash appears to have been a combination of poor weather conditions and pilot error. Peterson was not qualified for nighttime flights, and it also appears that he may have been given incorrect information regarding the weather conditions on that fateful night.
Referenced in:
American Pie – Don McLean
Air Crash Museum – Dead Milkmen
We Didn’t Start The Fire – Billy Joel
On this day, Sinatra completed the recording of this, his third album for the year, after a break of over a month – the rest of the album having been recorded between the 24th and 26th of March.
The album, considered a sequel to Sinatra’s earlier “Where Are You?”, includes a recording of “Stormy Weather”, a song written by Harold Arlen and Ted Koehler in 1933, and performed first by Ethel Waters at The Cotton Club night club in Harlem that year.
In the early days of space exploration, no government seemed ready to send humans into space. After all, no one knew what sort of effects exposure to conditions in space would have on human biology. But dogs and monkeys were fair game.
The United States launched monkey flights between 1948 and 1961, and France launched two monkey space flights in 1967. Most – but not all – monkeys were anesthetized before lift-off. Each monkey flew only one mission, although there were numerous back-up monkeys also went through the programs but never flew. Monkey species used included rhesus monkeys, cynomolgus monkeys, squirrel monkeys and pig-tailed macaques.
Able, was a rhesus monkey, and Miss Baker, a squirrel monkey, and on May 28, 1959, aboard the JUPITER AM-18, they became the first living beings to successfully return to Earth after traveling in space. They travelled in excess of 16,000 km/h, and withstood 38 g (373 m/s²). Their names had no particular significance, being simply taken from a phonetic alphabet.
Able died on June 1, 1959 during surgery but Baker lived into old age, dying on November 29, 1984, She is buried on the grounds of the US Space and Rocket Center in Huntsville, Alabama, and Able was preserved, and is now on display at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Museum.
Naked Lunch – no The – was first published in Paris in 1959. (US publication would wait until three years later.) It was a breakthrough novel for William S. Burroughs, who had spent five years writing it, mostly in Tangier, and mostly under the influence of a variety of drugs, or withdrawal from the same. As a text, it is a challenging work, with Burroughs’ hallucinatory prose further made confusing by the application of the Cut Up Method. Classifying it into a genre is nigh impossible, although it could be argued that the work prefigures both magic realism and gonzo journalism.
The book was not well received in the US upon its publication. In Burroughs’ own words:
When I started writing Naked Lunch, people offered their opinions: “Disgusting,” they said. “Pornographic, un-American trash!” “Unpublishable.” Well, it came out in 1959, and it found an audience: town meetings, book burnings and an inquiry by the state Supreme Court. That book made quite a little impression…
William Halsey Jnr was a graduate of the United States Naval Academy in 1904. In the years that followed, he rose through the ranks. By the end of World War One, he was a Lieutenant Commander, and at the time of Pearl Harbour, he was a Vice-Admiral.
Throughout most of World War Two, he commanded the American and Allied forces in the South Pacific as Admiral of the Third Fleet. Notably, he was the ranking officer in the Battle of Leyte Gulf, where American forces triumphed despite a number of errors of judgement on Halsey’s part.
He was present for Japan’s formal surrender on September 2, 1945 – indeed, the USS Missouri, was Halsey’s flagship. He retired from active duty in 1947, and died twelve years later, to be buried in Arlington Cemetary in Washington DC.
