The Yankee Comandante

by Michael Sallah

  Menoyo watched but didn’t say anything—for now. The men needed time to accept Morgan, who was more than capable of helping them. The American may not have been one of the training officers, but he knew how to fire a weapon. This revolution was more than student protests. It was a war, and they desperately needed to learn how to fight.

  One of the young rebels stepped to the line. Morgan adjusted the boy’s rifle strap to make sure it was taut. The tighter the strap, the more support and the less kickback. “No look at me,” Morgan told him, pointing to the tree.

  The young man held the rifle and then fired. The bullet glanced a small branch.

  “Bueno,” Morgan said, smiling.

  Camacho made another comment loud enough for everyone to hear and stormed off. It wasn’t over between the two men, but the rebels were starting to warm up to the Americano.

  Later that night, the men gathered around the camp. Sometimes, they told stories, sharing a rolled cigarette. Other times, they passed around an orange that someone picked off a tree. This time, they wanted to wrestle, squaring off to see who could pin whom. As Morgan watched the men size each other up to see who wanted to tussle, Camacho came over to him.

  “Vamos a luchar,” he said, pointing to the center of the camp. Let’s fight.

  Morgan smiled. Did he really want to wrestle? In front of everyone? Camacho didn’t know that in Ohio Morgan had spent hours wrestling under the porch lights on summer nights. For a street kid, he was tough and knew every basic move, from sweeps and takedowns to full nelsons. He was bigger than Camacho and, in his own estimation, stronger.

  Morgan didn’t say anything, but Camacho wasn’t going to leave it alone. Raising his voice, he made sure everyone in the camp heard him. “Vamos a luchar! ” he said.

  Morgan was blending into the unit, and he didn’t want to upset anyone, but this crazy training officer, a hotheaded Spaniard with a chip on his shoulder, was goading him openly.

  Everyone was looking now. Morgan had to defend his honor. He walked into the center of the camp where the others were standing and slowly unbuttoned his shirt. No sooner had he tossed it to the ground than Camacho snorted and lunged at him, trying to knock him over. Morgan stepped aside and let the Spaniard fly by and fall to the ground.

  Some of the rebels laughed as Camacho, red faced, rose and ran at Morgan again, determined to bowl him over. Morgan again stepped to the side, but this time, he caught Camacho as he ran by, turned him around, and wrapped his arms around him in a bear hug. Morgan’s face turned red, squeezing Camacho until his face, too, turned bright red. For a moment, no one said anything as Camacho began gasping for breath, unable to talk. After a few seconds, Morgan flung Camacho around and slammed him to the ground, dropping a karate chop that stopped just inches from his head.

  The rebels were speechless. Camacho, the tough guy of the unit—a demolitions expert who had fought against Franco’s soldiers—lay on his back. Morgan rose from his stance over Camacho, brushed the dirt from his fatigues, and stepped back. He wasn’t going to gloat. As far as he was concerned, it was over.

  “William didn’t want to embarrass him,” Redondo recalled.

  Camacho didn’t know it, but he had just been replaced.

  Morgan and Menoyo both heard the gunshots. They knew right away they had to bolt back to camp.

  The two men had walked off in the early morning to talk about Morgan’s emerging role in the Second Front, but now they had to turn around. Grabbing their rifles, they took off down the trail, the gunfire cracking louder as they neared Charco Azul.

  In the distance, they saw that dozens of soldiers had sprinted toward the thicket of trees where the rebels had set up camp. The rebels were firing from behind the trees, but at least a hundred soldiers were lining up around them. Two trucks circled the perimeter with .30- and .50-caliber machine guns tied to the rooftops. The rebels were trapped.

  Instead of stopping to size up the situation, Menoyo and Morgan rushed toward an opening, firing rapidly into the line of soldiers. With a British Sten submachine gun, Morgan sprayed the path in front of him as he bolted toward the camp. For a moment, neither man was sure that the other was going to make it, but within seconds, they broke through the perimeter.

  The rebels saw the two men moving toward them, firing at the soldiers from behind trees. By the time Menoyo reached his men, they were pinned down. They awaited his orders. But Menoyo didn’t know how many soldiers had surrounded them. Worse, Batista’s men had brought mortars. From the size of the units forming around the camp, the rebels figured they were fighting an entire battalion.

  “The army locked us in,” Redondo recalled.

  The rebels had acquired new weapons and ammunition since arriving at Guanayara, so they could hold out for a while, but the mortar explosives were falling down on them. The enemy lines were closing in from every side.

  In all of their encounters, the Second Front had never been in this kind of danger. This was payback for Finca Diana. More troubling was how the army knew the rebels’ exact position. The attack was too calculated, too coordinated. Most of the farmers and townspeople supported the revolución or at least stayed neutral, but some civilians may not have liked the guerrillas for one reason or another. Menoyo and the other leaders had warned the rebels about treating the locals with respect, but ultimately the Second Front was treading on their land.

  Some of the rebels found shelter behind a large stone wall at the camp and set up a firing position. The soldiers came ready and loaded. They could sustain a continuous assault on the rebels until they wiped them out. There was no way that Menoyo and the men pinned down in the camp could simply fight their way out of it.

  But they had two wildcards: Artola and Carreras. It had just dawned on Menoyo that neither man was around. They had left in the morning on separate reconnaissance patrols. Artola had fifteen men with him, and Carreras more than a dozen. They’d come back, and when they did, they were both smart enough to figure out what had happened and jump in. As long as Menoyo and the others could keep moving within the camp, they could buy more time.

  Carreras had heard the gunfire and turned around, but he stopped short when he saw the soldiers forming their lines. Instead of attacking from ground level, Carreras and his men took to the high ground—a ledge above the camp—and set up their position there. After everyone was in place, Carreras took out his binoculars to scope out the enemy line. Then he gave the order.

  At the same time, Artola and his men were approaching the camp from the opposite side. An experienced fighter, Artola noticed that the army was attacking from a traditional position, infantry in front and commanders in back. He and his men quickly took their place two hundred yards behind the officers’ position. With everyone ready, Artola ordered his men to open up.

  With Carreras firing from the high ground and Artola and his men shooting from the rear, the soldiers were totally confused. They were supposed to be fighting only a few dozen guerrillas, not a whole battalion.

  Menoyo saw his chance to escape. He ordered his men to gather around him. This was it. If they were going to die, they would do so singing the Cuban national anthem and charging the lines. He raised his hand and pointed forward. The rebels followed, firing their rifles.

  There was just one problem. Morgan couldn’t parse the Spanish and didn’t understand the order. He and several others stayed back and continued firing. Likewise, a smaller unit of government soldiers remained and returned fire. As he had done before, Morgan stood in place, gripping his Sten, shooting from a standing position.

  One of the army officers decided that he, too, was going to fight back from a standing position. Soon, the two men—Morgan and Lt. Antonio Regueira Luaces—were making a stand like cowboys in a Wild West gunfight, each refusing to give in.

  Morgan wanted “to slug it out with him,” Redondo recalled.

  Both men took turns di
ving for cover and then standing to return fire. Neither one was going to back down.

  In the distance, Menoyo and the other rebels watched as the Yanqui continued to fire, stubbornly refusing to run. After several more minutes, Menoyo finally ordered the other rebels to fire at the Batista lieutenant to break up the showdown. Most of the other soldiers had already long since retreated to the hills.

  In the end, five rebels died, compared to thirty government soldiers. Neither side could claim a clear victory, but the rebels had escaped certain annihilation. Batista’s army had dispatched five hundred men to avenge the loss at Finca Diana, and they had nothing to show for it.

  On that day, April 3, 1958, the New York Times published a story about the emergence of a new rebel unit in Cuba: the Segundo Frente. Reporter Herbert Matthews chronicled the unit’s brief history and its emerging role in the revolution, but he also included something else: Morgan’s letter about why he was fighting in Cuba. Camp messengers had delivered the note to rebel supporters, who then put it into the reporter’s hands. Now the outside world knew of the Second Front and William Morgan.

  9

  The truck jolted into gear and sped down the street. Olga Rodriguez gripped the rails, her hair flying in the breeze. Batista’s secret police had been running investigations of all the major revolutionaries helping the rebels. And someone had given them her name.

  No one had expected this. The dark, pretty student government leader had been quiet about her anti-government activities to protect her family. For most of her student life, she had kept it that way. She had volunteered to smuggle medical supplies to the rebels only because no one suspected her as a rebel herself.

  As the truck made its way toward the safe house, the driver begged her to keep down. SIM officers already had been to Olga’s school. Soon they would target her parents’ home on Calle Independencia. Olga thought about her parents, her sisters, and her cousin Gilberto, who lived with her family in the cramped little cinder-block house. She had put them all in danger.

  Batista had been trying to root out the network in Santa Clara supporting the Second Front. In a new tactic, the cops were staking out the family and friends of suspects and then breaking them down through intimidation. It had never been this bad.

  The truck pulled up to a house on the edge of the Central University of Las Villas in Santa Clara. The driver escorted Olga inside. For now, it would be her hiding place, but she had no guarantees about how long it would last. The cops were on a mission to hunt her down.

  It wasn’t a secret that Olga was president of the student government at the teachers college, a radical school with a long history of social protest. But many people didn’t know how deeply she had delved into the cause. Not even her parents knew, nor her siblings. With every death, every missing person, Olga went deeper: another protest, another collection of money to send to the rebels. By the time she met with her fellow students, Olga herself was the topic of the meeting. They had to find a way to save her.

  Olga Rodriguez, age twenty, at the Normal Teachers School in Santa Clara Courtesy of Morgan Family Collection

  The cops had been working the streets, flashing Olga’s picture. They had stopped at the college, trying to shake down the principal. Soon she’d have to flee to another safe house.

  Olga didn’t know that the SIM had barged into her family’s home and had torn the place apart. They searched the rooms, closets, and the yard. Olga’s mother stood by the door, trembling. She knew the cops weren’t going to rest until they found her daughter. Then they found Gilberto.

  Four years older than Olga, Gilberto had lived with the family since he was a boy. He was her cousin, but he was still a family member and it was perfectly acceptable to wail on the male relatives to make a point. Two of the SIM cops found him on a street corner and demanded to know her whereabouts. Gilberto looked at both men and shook his head. He wasn’t going to give her up. They demanded to know, but Gilberto dug in. Not a word.

  One of the men grabbed him from behind, while the other punched him in the face, chest, and stomach. The blows kept coming, blood gushing from his nose and mouth. The agents carried him to the car and threw him inside.

  It was time to take him to the Rodriguez home. By the time Olga’s mother rushed to the door, Gilberto had crumpled to the ground, a bloody pulp.

  “Gilberto!” she screamed, falling next to him. She pleaded for the cops to stop.

  “This is nothing,” one said, compared to what was in store for Olga.

  Olga had to leave. She needed to save herself and, more urgently, save her family. She had thought about it, and now realized she needed to make a drastic move: She had to head to the mountains. The secret police would be heading back to Olga’s home and would surely harm other family members. It was a matter of time before they found her, too.

  “I need to be with the rebels,” she said.

  At first, the students helping her were doubtful. Just getting her to the Escambray would be difficult, but the bigger problem was there were no women with the rebels in the mountains.

  “It’s not possible,” her handler told her.

  Olga pushed back. She argued that women had joined the rebels in the Sierra Maestra. If her fellow students wouldn’t help her, she’d find a way. She wasn’t going to stay.

  One of the students finally agreed to talk to a faculty member in the underground movement. If they could find an escort to take her, they would allow it. But if they couldn’t, Olga had to wait.

  That night, Olga closed her eyes, but sleep didn’t come easy. The hours dragged as she thought about her predicament. In just two short years, she had gone from being a student from an obscure family to a revolutionary wanted by the president’s secret police. Getting to the rebel camp would be one of the toughest journeys of her life.

  First, she had to reach the foothills. The soldiers had set up checkpoints and were stopping vehicles suspected of going to the mountains to aid the rebels. Buses went to Manicaragua, but the army stopped and searched those, too. The cops had photos of her, which made the trek that much more risky. Before she did anything, she needed to change her appearance.

  She grabbed a pair of scissors and went into the bathroom. With her dark hair and eyes, she had once been one of the most beautiful girls in her school. But none of that mattered anymore. As her long locks fell to her shoulders and the floor, she realized it would be a long time before she could ever come back again—if ever. The life she knew in Santa Clara was over.

  Taking a bottle of hair color that a friend had left at the house, she poured it onto her head, rubbing it in. Slowly, she was looking at a new person in the mirror. Her face and hair looked different. Now all she had to do was pull a cap over her eyes.

  As she finished, Olga heard a knock at the door. The students had found her escort.

  “I will help you,” he said. “But you have to listen to everything I say. We don’t have much time.”

  As he stepped into the house, he reached behind his waistband and pulled out a .22-caliber revolver. Olga needed to carry it where no one could find it. Without flinching, she turned around and shoved the gun into her panties. Then tucking in her shirt, she turned around again.

  “I am ready,” she said.

  The plan was simple. They would both board the bus, but they would do so separately and sit apart. If they were caught, Olga’s escort would fire on the soldiers so she could flee.

  “It is better that you don’t even know my name,” he said.

  They walked to the station, each on opposite sides of the street, and boarded the bus. As they moved down the aisle, they made sure they sat across from each other.

  As the bus pulled away, she thought about her family. She never had a chance to say good-bye. She wondered whether she would ever see her mother again. Before sundown, she’d reach Manicarag
ua. If she was lucky, she would reach the central mountains in a day. She had taken this familiar route while carrying packages for the rebels, past the grassy acres that rolled endlessly from Santa Clara to the foothills of the Escambray.

  She thought of her grandmother, Inocencia Pozo, who had fled to these same mountains a half century earlier during the war for independence. Olga would sit for hours listening to her “Mambisa” describe her own experiences as a young girl, smuggling weapons under her dress to the rebels. She was taken prisoner but ended up marrying the man who captured her, Rafael Rodriguez, a Spanish captain who stayed in Cuba after the war. He died on the day Olga was born.

  The vehicle jolted as it slowed and stopped. Suddenly the door opened, and several men in uniforms boarded. Olga gasped. She didn’t know what to do. She looked over, but her escort wasn’t moving. She needed to stay calm. She needed to breathe deeply. The men walked down the aisle, staring at every passenger, one by one.

  One of them came to Olga. Just stare straight ahead. No eye contact. He looked at Olga as he held up a photo. He glanced back at Olga, and then he slowly turned around and walked away.

  Olga looked over at her escort. They had made it. But they also knew there were many more miles to go.

  When the bus came to a halt at the next station, Olga’s escort stood and turned to her. It was time to get off. They hadn’t reached Manicaragua, but it was no longer safe for either one to be on board anymore. They bounded down the steps and began walking down the street, when Olga’s escort turned and pointed back to the vehicle. A cadre of cops waving guns had rushed inside.