Months earlier, Batista’s soldiers had surrounded the fledgling rebel unit, which was lucky enough to escape into a nearby jungle, losing just one man. Not long after, the soldiers hunted down the rebels near the farm, this time killing six—a quarter of the entire unit—on Christmas Day. Some of the rebels were close to giving up, but Menoyo refused to let them return to their homes. If they had even a shred of a chance of overthrowing Batista, it was here in the mountains, the hinterland, not the cities and certainly not Havana. They needed to stick it out until they had gathered enough men and weapons.
Menoyo had learned after watching his brother die in the disastrous attack on the presidential palace that the rebels needed to pull Batista and his men from their comfort zone—like Castro had done—into the mountains. They had to engage in guerrilla warfare.
The sun was rising over the mountains and Menoyo and his men were about to set up camp when word came from one of their scouts: The soldiers were in view.
He couldn’t count them all, but at least a dozen were moving down a deer trail toward their position. Menoyo ordered the rebels to take cover with a clear view of the trail below and to wait for his orders.
This time, Morgan was ready, clutching his rifle. He was determined not to mess up.
With the rebels lined up on both sides, the soldiers came into view. Menoyo waited. Tres . . . dos . . . uno . . .
Finally, Menoyo motioned for the rebels to fire. Gunshots cracked from the ridge above. The surprised soldiers jumped for cover. Morgan stood up over the other rebels, gripping his rifle, as his rounds sliced through the brush, hitting the trees and ground below. The others stayed down and in place, but Morgan stood up and kept moving forward.
Some of the soldiers took position and fired back, but it was impossible to get clear shots by aiming upward. In just twenty minutes, the soldiers realized they were going to have to retreat or get pinned down and die. One by one, they stopped firing and retreated. For the first time, Menoyo and his men had repelled the enemy without running.
It was calm for now, but Menoyo knew the soldiers would return with more men and firepower.
Jesús Carreras Zayas, one of the comandantes of the Second Front Courtesy of Morgan Family Collection
A half mile from the skirmish, he could see the rocks jutting out from high above the pass. As the men neared the farm, Menoyo spotted the ridge. If they could reach that point, they could set up camp, wait for the soldiers to return, and launch another ambush.
Menoyo knew the soldiers would be bringing an entire company—and they’d be angry. If they, a ragtag band of rebel farmers, beat them twice, the soldiers would be humiliated before their superiors.
As they trudged up the steep hill, Menoyo decided to pull out their most formidable weapon: a Czech submachine gun they kept for just this reason. A light model made just after World War II, the weapon was capable of spitting out 650 rounds per minute. It was all they had.
The man carrying the Czech gun, Jesús Carreras Zayas, had been with him from the beginning. The quiet, brooding rebel had left his job as a lab technician in the southern coastal town of Trinidad. Tough and ornery, Carreras drank and got into scrapes, bragging that he wasn’t afraid of anyone. Most of the time, that was true. During the early days of the anti-Batista movement, Carreras was set up by an undercover agent working for the government. Rather than risk arrest, he jumped in a Jeep, shot the agent, and took off, taking a bullet in the shoulder in the process but managing to escape. Menoyo ordered Carreras to set up the machine gun, picking a spot with just enough range to spray the entire trail with bullets.
After taking time to scout the area, Menoyo directed some of the men to take positions along the high ground—one here, another there, others far to the right and left. Then he counted out more men and moved them to the rear. This way, the rebels could conceal their own numbers so the soldiers had no idea the size of the force they were fighting.
Menoyo dragged his knapsack and his M3 submachine gun to a point above the trail, sat down, and waited. The sun beat down on the men as they clutched their weapons.
Any faint sound—the snapping of branches, the flutter of birds scurrying from a nest—would be their sign. By three o’clock, one of the scouts rushed back. “Vienen,” he whispered. They’re coming—two hundred, maybe more, on the trail.
Menoyo was right. They were coming back with more men. Once again, Morgan gripped his rifle and took aim. As the first few soldiers appeared on the trail, Menoyo waited. Not yet. The more soldiers on the trail, the more they could surprise them, and the more casualties they could inflict.
Wait. Wait.
Menoyo gave the signal. Carreras opened up, unleashing a barrage that ripped into the earth. Some of the soldiers fell down, struck by bullets; others ran for cover.
Pinned down, the soldiers began firing back to stop the attack. “There was no place they could pass,” Redondo recalled.
The soldiers were in chaos. Some were screaming on the ground. Others were trying to get away. As the two sides came closer, two of the rebels were hit.
Once again, Morgan rose above the fray, clutching his rifle, and now—standing up—began firing on the enemy in a frenzy. While the others looked on, Morgan continued moving forward, bullets flying on both sides, shooting round after round. The enemy slowly fell back, some retreating down the path by which they had come, others scrambling into the brush.
After several more minutes, it was over. Except for the dozen soldiers dead on the ground, the company had disappeared. The rebels waited several minutes, no one moving. Then, one by one, they walked down from the ledge.
They had done it. They had repelled at least two hundred soldiers in the same place where the army once had run them into the hills. The younger men stared at Morgan. They had never seen anyone stand up in battle and fire, refusing to take cover. “Está loco,” they said. He’s crazy.
Even Menoyo stopped for a moment and looked at his Americano guerrilla. He saw something in Morgan that he hadn’t seen in the others. When the bullets were flying, the Americano didn’t retreat. In a revolution that was about to get nasty, Menoyo was going to need him.
No one had expected this, not the military leadership and certainly not the farmers who waited until dawn to venture to the ridge. More than a dozen men in uniforms—Batista soldiers—lay sprawled on the ground, their bodies riddled with bullets. The farmers were stunned. They knew about the battle, but they thought they would be burying rebels, not soldiers.
They couldn’t leave the cadavers rotting in the sun, so they lifted them up and threw them on the backs of their horses. One by one, the horses moved down the path, the bodies tied to their backs. At El Pinto, the local store, the locals whispered among themselves about what had happened. Months earlier, they had watched as the guerrillas retreated. Now they were seeing something far different.
“It was important for the whole area,” recalled Armando Fleites Diaz, one of the rebels. “We made a stand.”
Word spread to nearby towns.
Redondo, the rebel who had split from the unit days earlier to hide the guns, heard about the rebel victory miles away in another town. By then, the stories had grown. “They were talking about the bearded, six-foot guerrillas,” he recalled. But it was clear the victory at Finca Diana was having an impact on recruiting new members in the Escambray. Scores of farmers began showing up in the mountains, asking to join the Second Front.
7
Menoyo held up the map. “Here,” he said, jabbing a finger on the crumbled, folded paper.
The other rebels peered over his shoulder and stared at the spot: Guanayara. To most of the men, it was no-man’s-land, a remote area deep in the Escambray.
Everyone knew that Batista’s army would return with everything it had: aircraft, mortars, more men. The Second Front needed to ge
t out. If they could get to the mountain outpost, they could send word to the towns—their loyal networks—and dig in, build new positions. Every rebel force needed its own base. But this wasn’t going to be easy. It meant crossing an uphill area covered by thick, wild brush with a couple dozen men and few supplies.
The only rebel to object was Faure Chomón Mediavilla, one of the leaders of the group who had long pushed for another strategy: waging war in the city, not the mountains. Now was as good a time as any to return to Havana.
Menoyo and Chomón had been quarrelling for days, and both men were beginning to show little regard for the other. Chomón didn’t care that the rebels had just scored a victory. The rebels depended on the support of teachers and union workers in the cities, like Havana and Santa Clara. They needed to go back to the capital, hit at the top. Why risk the lives of these men on coffee plantations, Chomón asked, his voice rising.
But Menoyo dug in. He wasn’t going to be told how to run the unit. He had decided long ago the way to win the revolution was by striking Batista where he was most vulnerable: in the mountains. Batista had no real presence in the countryside. His soldiers had never engaged in bush fighting. Menoyo had just shown that with the right training and tactics they could beat the army and then take their .50-caliber machine guns. If they could score enough victories in the hills, they would demoralize the enemy, which would surrender elsewhere. Like a picador in a bullfight, wear down the beast with the lance, one cut at a time.
By now, both men were yelling at each other.
In front of the other men, Chomón turned around and began packing. His time in the mountains was over. He and the men loyal to him would take some of the weapons and trek to Fomento, then Havana. Menoyo and others would push deeper into the mountains.
Chomón stormed off. It was done.
The two leaders would forge their own paths, but it was still a setback for the Second Front. Menoyo had lost more men and weapons. Weeks might pass before he could rebuild the unit to that same point. The guerrillas needed to leave the province and embark on a dangerous trek across treacherous terrain with no guarantees that they’d make it.
The wind howled through the pine trees, scattering birds into the night air. No one wanted to move. The rebels had been cutting through the thick brush leading into the highlands. Their bodies ached. The deeper they trudged into the badlands, the darker and more foreboding it became. Only a couple of the men had ever been this far in the mountains. It was hard to see even fifteen feet ahead, but the best time to move was at night.
Morgan had been dragging along the dark trail and was starting to feel dizzy. He had been shivering earlier in the day, and now his face, covered with grime, was turning red. Something was wrong.
But Menoyo couldn’t wait. He had to keep pace in order to reach Guanayara in time. New recruits were going to meet the unit there, hopefully with badly needed supplies.
“Get moving,” Menoyo told the men.
Some tossed down their hats, others threw up their hands, but all knew that they needed to follow orders. They rose, grabbed their knapsacks and rifles, and filtered back onto the trail.
Armando Fleites, the only physician in the Second Front, could tell that some of the younger recruits were leery of their new surroundings, so he took them aside. They needed to trust in Menoyo and the leaders, he said. They were all taking risks, but that’s why they were in the mountains.
Like Menoyo, Fleites, a tall imposing barbudo with piercing eyes, was deeply influenced by his father, a doctor who took to the mountains thirty years earlier during a revolution against then-president Gerardo Muchado.
When Fleites decided to join the fight against Batista, his father gave him a handgun and hugged him. “It’s your duty,” the elder man told him. His mother gave him a cross.
As the men began climbing onto a trail, they noticed that both Morgan and Lorenzo were gone. Menoyo swung around and descended the trail, cursing under his breath. After passing a clump of trees, he came upon the two men, still on the ground.
“Get up,” Menoyo ordered them.
Morgan looked up but didn’t budge. “I need time to rest,” he said. He had a bad case of the runs, and it was clear he was dehydrated.
But to Menoyo, it didn’t matter. He needed to keep his men alive. Leaving them was not negotiable. He leaned over and looked Morgan in the eyes. Menoyo had made it clear from the outset that he was in charge, he said. If Morgan ever needed to dig down deep, he needed to do it now. If he ever needed to muster the strength to move forward, he needed to do it now.
Damn it, do it now.
Even in his fog, Morgan was surprised. It had been years since anyone had talked to him like this. But Menoyo had made it clear: The Second Front needed him, and Menoyo wasn’t going to leave him in the bush.
Morgan rose to his knees and then stood. He immediately got behind twenty-year-old Lorenzo, who had torn the ligaments in his foot days earlier, and slowly helped him up. Then, Morgan took a rope out of Lorenzo’s knapsack and tied it around the young man’s waist. Taking the other end, Morgan tied it around his waist. Moments later, the rebels watched as Morgan, propping up Lorenzo, moved slowly toward them, one step at a time. Just weeks after Morgan’s rocky start with the rebels, he was becoming one of them.
The rebels broke through the trees and threw down their packs. Soaked in sweat and covered in dirt, they fell to the ground. Everyone was hurting. Lorenzo needed to be in a clinic, mending. Others had deep cuts from brush and thorns, and their feet were cracked and bleeding.
But now, almost to Guanayara, the rebels finally figured out why Menoyo had brought them here. The terrain was rough and steep, making it nearly impassable for Jeeps and trucks. The trees were some of the tallest in the mountains. The soldiers would have to come by foot. Menoyo was leveling the playing field. He gave the order to set up camp in a place known as Charco Azul.
Some of the rebels headed to a nearby farmhouse to talk to the guajiros, seeking their help. Before anything else, the men needed food and water. For days, their diet had consisted of coconuts and malanga, a dark, starchy root they boiled for a main course. Most of the men were fighting stomach or intestinal flare-ups, largely from dehydration and heatstroke. At least now they could crawl under the cover of mahogany trees to rest.
Exhausted, Morgan walked to the edge of camp and found a tree. It had taken all the strength he could muster to carry Lorenzo. He thought about his family, his children. It would be a long time before he would see them again, if ever. He had come close to passing out in the hot sun and being left behind. If he died here, no one would know why he was even in Cuba.
If he could just write it down, put it on paper, maybe he could explain to the people he left behind. He figured it was his only chance.
He walked over to the center of camp and asked one of the rebels for a piece of paper and a pencil. The young barbudo looked puzzled, but he handed Morgan a rolled-up piece. Morgan inched back into the shade. Leaning over, he scribbled down his thoughts. Even if no one ever read them, at least he could put them down in words.
“Why I am here? Why did I come here far from my home and family? I am here because I believe the most important thing for free men to do is to protect the freedom of others.”
It wasn’t about adventure or money or fame. It was about fighting against the “forces that want to take the rights of people away.”
He reflected on his experience with Lorenzo. As a youngster, Lorenzo worked in a store in Havana and watched as Batista’s soldiers shook down the owner for free food, while the poor could barely scrape together enough to buy scraps of bread.
Even after injuring his foot in the mountains, Lorenzo refused to lie down, said Morgan. “Here, the impossible happens every day. Where a boy of 19 can march 12 hours with a broken foot over a country comparable to the American Rockies without complaint.”
Morgan folded the paper and walked over to Menoyo. He wanted to get it to the people supporting the Second Front in Havana. If anything happened to him, at least others would know why he was here.
8
The rebels gathered with their rifles. Some were teenagers who had dropped out of school; others were in their forties, right out of the fields. One by one, they stepped to the line.
“Listos! ” came the first command. “Aspunten! ” And finally: “Fuego! ”
With every order, they followed the three steps. Ready, aim, fire. Some of the shots splintered the tree, others barely grazed the branches. Most of the men had no weapons training, and the rifle’s kickback was throwing them off.
Standing in the rear of the camp, Morgan could see the frustration on Menoyo’s face. The Second Front didn’t have enough weapons, and most of the new volunteers were inexperienced fighters.
Morgan set down the gun he was cleaning and strode to the firing line. He was supposed to wait his turn, like everyone else, but he couldn’t help himself.
“Mira,” he said. Look.
Taking an M1 from one of the rebels, he held the rifle in front of him and yanked on the sling to make sure everyone saw his grip. Wrapping the strap around his shoulder, he lined up the rear and front sights. Squinting, he took aim, and then—bracing his hold with the sling—squeezed the trigger. The bullet struck the tree dead center. No one said a word. Some had seen what he had done in the skirmishes at Finca Diana, the crazy Americano walking toward the gunfire.
Most of the rebels nodded with approval, but one stood in the rear, glaring over the other rebels’ shoulders. Regino Camacho Santos—a Spaniard from the Canary Islands—grew up among people whose distrust of Americans had run deep since the Spanish-American War. He wanted nothing to do with them. It was difficult enough for him to watch Morgan wearing the fatigues of the Second Front, but the Yanqui was butting in where he didn’t belong. Camacho, a veteran of the Spanish Civil War, was supposed to be the training officer, and he was being upstaged by a foreigner. As Morgan coaxed the rebels to the firing line, the Spaniard made a snide comment loud enough for others to hear.
The Yankee Comandante Page 5