The Yankee Comandante

by Michael Sallah

  “You’re here,” said Morgan.

  “Of course,” she said. “They are not going to keep me from you.”

  The moment broke the tension of a long day. Morgan had had to leave the base earlier in the day to stop civilians from looting and hunting down former Batista government workers. He also had to impose a ban on liquor sales as well as a curfew to keep order in the streets.

  “We are not criminals,” he told the rebels enforcing the emergency measures.

  Along the busy streets, people recognized him. “Weel-yam Morgan,” they shouted from balconies and cars. He wasn’t a hero just in the Escambray. He was getting calls from reporters in Cuba and America as well. Hundreds of newspapers carried an Associated Press feature story about the Americano who had hunted Batista’s soldiers in the mountains. The Havana Post ran a piece on the Yanqui comandante and his exploits in battle. It wasn’t Menoyo who was emerging as a major rebel figure in the Second Front. It was Morgan.

  For her part, Olga just wanted to find a quiet place where she could be with her husband and talk about their life together. He had survived, and that was all that mattered to her. As they held each other, a messenger barged into the room: People were trying to break into city hall.

  Morgan had to go.

  She followed him outside to the parking lot, where he jumped into a Jeep and sped away. She climbed into another Jeep with another crew in pursuit. She watched as he wheeled through the streets, rounding corners and vanishing into the darkness.

  Menoyo didn’t have time to sleep. He didn’t have time to eat. Instead of joining the rebels at the presidential palace, he was breaking up fights in the streets. In every Havana neighborhood, people were roaming, some with guns in hand, smashing store windows. At the Riviera, a crowd of angry civilians broke into the casino, turning loose a herd of pigs in the swanky hotel. Others barged into the Sevilla-Biltmore to break open the slot machines. Menoyo had had enough.

  “Grab your guns, and get into the streets,” he ordered his men. If the other rebel groups couldn’t control the neighborhoods, the Second Front would. He broke his men into teams. One would go into the Miramar neighborhood, an upscale enclave of opulent homes with lushly landscaped lawns and pools. Another would venture into Vedado, an eclectic district of stores, hotels, and apartment buildings.

  “There will be no looting,” said Menoyo.

  Alfredo Peña, a soldier in the Cuban army before joining the Second Front, would patrol the businesses, including banks and car dealerships. Menoyo and his men would patrol downtown to keep troublemakers from breaking what remained of the law.

  While Menoyo and his men guarded downtown Havana, a group of rebels and civilians led by Camilo Cienfuegos reached the sweeping entrance to Camp Columbia, the massive military headquarters. Batista commander Ramon Barquin had already looked at all his options, and they weren’t good. Even his men knew it was over. Batista was gone. The regime had panicked.

  After several tense minutes, Barquin walked out of the base. There would be no standoff or confrontation. He was turning the base over to the rebels.

  At La Cabaña, the ancient military prison, it was the same: Che and his bedraggled men showed up at the gates to deliver an ultimatum. Colonel Manuel Varela Castro met them with an olive branch. The army wasn’t going to offer any resistance.

  In just hours, two of the foremost institutions of government had fallen into the hands of Castro’s key men.

  26

  Rings circled his eyes, and his face was flushed from the sun and sweat. Morgan was exhausted. Olga tried to get him to rest, but he had made the safety of Cienfuegos a personal mission. Traffic was moving down Paseo del Prado, due in part to the patrols he had established. Most of the troublemakers had been locked up.

  After pulling into the naval station for another briefing, he received an urgent call. It was a messenger: Be on your guard; you are about to get a visitor. Fidel Castro.

  After leaving Santiago de Cuba for Havana, 470 miles away, Castro decided to divert his route. He was coming to Cienfuegos. Morgan had heard rumblings that Castro was crossing the country in a caravan on his way to the capital, but he hadn’t given it much thought. Some of the Second Front rebels grumbled about the 26th of July leader’s decision to change course. After all, Cienfuegos was the only major city that fell under the control of the Second Front.

  Morgan shrugged. His men needed to get ready. Their problems had been with Che, not Fidel. “We will show him respect,” Morgan said.

  The revolution had far bigger problems looming. The rebel groups were struggling to see who gets power. In Havana, the Directorio members were refusing to leave the presidential palace.

  Castro’s group had demanded that they vacate the building so his group could move in. From what the Directorio could tell, Castro’s people were all but taking over. They had moved into all of the major garrisons and occupied nearly all of the police precincts. During his caravan ride, Castro barked over the radio that the country needed a new provisional president. Then he proceeded to name fifty-nine-year-old provincial judge Manuel Urrutia Lleó to the post, along with a cabinet.

  He had iced out the Directorio. After listening to the radio broadcasts, Rolando Cubela had enough. He dashed off a note to the 26th of July Movement, demanding that the Directorio have a seat in the new government and that the “members and the blood shed by them be fully recognized.” Otherwise, he wasn’t budging.

  News of a showdown rippled across the country.

  Dressed in olive fatigues and a sidearm in his waistband, Castro jumped into the crowd waiting for him. “Bienvenido a Cienfuegos! ” people yelled as they ran around him. Wearing his rebel cap and sporting a dark, full beard, he wasted no time moving along the line of people, shaking hands. Ever since Batista left, Castro was emerging as the next leader of Cuba, drawing television cameras in nearly every province where he stopped. Many of his speeches in the small towns were being broadcast into the capital.

  Unlike the other towns that Castro had visited, Cienfuegos was a bastion of the Second Front. More people in the Escambray unit came from this city than any other. Scores of rebels bearing the Second Front insignia came out for Castro’s entrance, leaving no doubt of the unit’s strength in numbers.

  As he stepped into the welcoming throng on Jagua Bay, Castro wasn’t the only person commanding the attention of the crowd. Even as Morgan stood by, watching, people rushed up to him, pulling on his uniform and hugging him. Everywhere he went, he drew his own crowd.

  For a brief, awkward moment, two of the most popular leaders of the Cuban revolution were in the same place, the crowd parting as the two rebel leaders came together. Olga watched carefully as her husband stood toe to toe with Castro. Both men reached out their hands to shake. The one thing they shared at the moment was that neither man had slept in days, both pushing on adrenaline. Castro nodded and then slipped back into the crowd. He had just a few hours to make a stand before moving on to Havana for another grand entrance.

  Castro and his entourage made their way to Restaurante Covadonga for a celebratory dinner. As everyone squeezed inside, waiters rushed around the tables, handing out plates steaming with fresh paella. Castro barely picked at his food as he worked the crowd, stopping at tables to talk.

  Dozens of Second Front members slipped inside as well, but after several minutes, Olga noticed something. All of the Second Front rebels were on one side of the room, the 26th of July rebels and Castro on the other. There was some small talk, but Castro was steering clear of the barbudos from the Escambray. After several more minutes of watching the body language in the room, Olga went over to Morgan.

  “I’m not feeling well,” she said. “I’m going to leave.”

  Morgan looked at her, puzzled.

  “No,” she snapped. “It’s time to go.”

  She slipped out the door.

  27r />
  Cursing aloud, Morgan threw his Sten over his shoulder and jumped into the Jeep outside his office. He had just returned to the naval base when a messenger rushed inside, nearly out of breath. Two of the young Second Front rebels had been drinking. No one knew where they got the liquor, but they were staggering down the street.

  “You need to get over there,” the messenger said.

  Morgan and his men had been enforcing the liquor ban, picking up people breaking the law and even locking them up when necessary. But this was inexcusable.

  Wheeling down the boulevard, Morgan was intent on hunting them down. “He was angry, angry, angry,” recalled Olga.

  The pressure on Morgan had been building, and no one could see that more than she could. He wasn’t sleeping but a couple of hours a night. He wasn’t eating. He listened to the radio, waited for emergency calls, and then drove off in his Jeep. Every time she looked up, he was rushing out the door. He had managed to keep the vigilantism and other activities to a minimum—unlike the peacekeepers in Havana.

  But the call clearly unnerved him. If he had to spend the rest of the day speeding up and down the Paseo del Prado, he would find them. Shortly after leaving the base, he rounded a street corner and spotted the two young men down the block. It was bad enough that they were just kids, but they were wearing the patches of the Segundo Frente.

  Morgan’s face went red and his eyes narrowed. “Venir aqui! ” he shouted in mangled Spanish.

  He tore into them. They not only had disobeyed his orders, but they were reflecting poorly on a unit that had fought for the liberation of their country. “What’s wrong with you? ” he screamed.

  The young barbudos stood there, dumbfounded, mouths agape. They had never seen Morgan so angry. They didn’t know what to say. Morgan wanted them off the streets. He never wanted to see them drinking again. Not in his town.

  He had been hard on them, and he knew it. But he couldn’t let it go. In the mountains, he had become a leader for the first time in his life. He not only saw the difference in himself when commanding his column, but in what he was able to do to keep others alive. With everything unraveling in Cuba after the fighting, he was being asked to do it again. Though the war had ended, he couldn’t just drop being a commander. Cienfuegos would have fallen into chaos without him and his men. He had to stay.

  The demand of keeping Cienfuegos in order wasn’t the only matter weighing on his mind. In the early morning, Olga watched him pull out the pictures of Billy and Annie. He stared at the photos and placed them by his side. She knew how much he missed them. The war had allowed him to compartmentalize his life in a way that kept the problems of his past from creeping in. But it was all coming back.

  Che Guevara was just getting started. He had swept the Directorio out of the way for the time being. But there was still the Second Front. They were everywhere. Castro had installed the new government, but Menoyo’s men remained a visible force. Morgan was overseeing Cienfuegos, and Menoyo and his barbudos still appeared on the busiest street corners of Havana, toting weapons and wearing their own uniforms. It was precisely what Castro had predicted.

  Weeks earlier, under a flashlight in the darkness of his camp, Castro had fired off a letter to Che, complaining that Che never should have signed any pacts with the Second Front. It was going to haunt them. Those same rebels would vie for power with the 26th of July Movement. “They want instead to share the fruits of our victories to strengthen its tiny revolutionary appliance and arise tomorrow with all kinds of claims,” Castro wrote.

  For two men so close, the letter came as a rebuke. But Che had plenty of time to redeem himself. The 26th of July had more men in its ranks now than ever before. It controlled every military base, prison, airport, and seaport other than Cienfuegos. They occupied nearly every garrison in Cuba and had appointed their own president and cabinet. They owned Cuba.

  Castro, Menoyo, and Morgan Courtesy of Morgan Family Collection

  Che sent a message to Menoyo for a meeting. The place: La Cabaña, Che’s headquarters. The request was marked urgent.

  When Menoyo received the message, he looked at his men and shrugged. The last person he wanted to meet with was Che. He didn’t like him. He didn’t trust him. Che wasn’t the leader of Cuba. “Who the hell does he think he is?” Menoyo complained. If Che wanted to meet with the leadership of the Second Front, Menoyo was going to bring everyone. Menoyo, Carreras, Felix Vasquez, a captain, and dozens of others would show up at the gates with their weapons.

  The Second Front hadn’t asked for anything from Castro. All they wanted was democracy—elections. After breaking his word and ordering men into the southern zone, Che clearly wanted something, but what? The two groups still hadn’t settled their differences.

  “Everyone was angry,” recalled Jorge Castellon, then a sixteen-year-old Second Front rebel.

  When they arrived at La Cabaña, Che was waiting. It wasn’t a social visit. No sooner had they gathered in the courtyard than Che lit into them. He trashed Carreras, accusing him of being a thief and a drunkard.

  “It got ugly,” Menoyo recalled.

  Carreras jumped to within a few feet of Che. “Let’s go out there now—you and I with our guns,” he said. For a moment, it looked like both men were going to kill each other. The bad blood from the mountains hadn’t faded.

  Che glared. The country was operating under a provisional government, which meant the Second Front needed to disband, he said. The revolution was over. Menoyo pulled his submachine gun off his shoulder. No one was going to tell him to disband his unit. “Why don’t you take care of your own?” Menoyo shot back.

  Castellon recalled gripping his gun, his fingers curled around the trigger, pointing it at Che. “We almost had a shoot-out.”

  Che saw the meeting heading for disaster. If the Second Front stayed any longer, a bloodbath would ensue. “This meeting is over,” he announced.

  Menoyo put down his weapon and turned his back on the Argentine. He motioned for his men to follow him through the gates of the ancient fortress. Other rebel groups may have acquiesced to Che, but Menoyo wasn’t about to let the Second Front do the same.

  Morgan hung up the phone and turned to Olga. “This isn’t good,” he said.

  Too much was happening. It was time to pack up and head to the capital. After just a few minutes on the phone with Menoyo, Morgan knew the Second Front was in trouble.

  The new revolutionary government was stamping out all opposition. As long as the Second Front existed, its men were in trouble. If they disbanded, it would take the pressure off the men, but then they would lose any authority or protection, said Menoyo.

  Che had gone mad. Every other day, he was ordering sham trials of prisoners. The men hearing the cases were mostly rebels with no judicial experience. Then the prisoners were hauled to the wall—El Paredon—and shot to death.

  In Santiago de Cuba, hundreds of miles away, it was much the same: A team of executioners led by Raúl Castro forced more than seventy Batista soldiers and police to stand next to a large pit at the edge of town with priests who were allowed to hear their last confessions. Then, in twos, the soldiers were shot to death, falling into the mass grave.

  Olga understood when Morgan told her it was best to move to Havana. Some of Morgan’s key men would stay behind, but their work in Cienfuegos was largely over. The fate of the Second Front lay in the capital.

  28

  Morgan eased his Jeep up to the side of the towering Havana hotel, checking for any security breaches. After a long, winding drive from Cienfuegos, Morgan and Olga arrived at the Capri to size up the hotel as a temporary home. Weeks earlier, hotel managers thought it a good idea to open their doors to the rebels after Batista fled, so they invited the guerrillas to stay as long as no one trashed the place.

  His Sten slung over his shoulder, Morgan w
alked into the lobby, taking in the smooth tile floor and the sun shining through the tinted glass. No one doubted the elegance of the nineteen-story edifice with glass chandeliers hanging over white-linen-covered tables and a plush casino.

  But Morgan wasn’t concerned with luxuries. He wanted to make sure that he, Olga, and his men would be safe. The place had plenty of doors and access points in each direction for his men to come and go. The fact that the high-rise had balconies with thick concrete floors gave them an advantage if they had to defend themselves.

  Bankrolled by Tampa crime boss Santo Trafficante Jr., the hotel featured a pool on the roof and stood a few blocks from the Malecón, the main road along the harbor. Some of the rebels fanned out around the grounds, scouting the hotel’s proximity to the closest major streets in the Vedado neighborhood: Avenida 23 and La Línea. They weren’t expecting imminent attacks on the Second Front. After all, Fidel Castro’s government was still solidifying its position. But Che and Raúl were taking control and pinpointing their enemies.

  As the rebels headed to their rooms, a familiar figure walked through the entrance. Menoyo had waited anxiously for the men to arrive. He wanted the Second Front all together. He was especially glad to see Morgan. Weeks had passed since the two had seen each other.

  After greeting everyone, he pulled Morgan aside. “We need to talk,” he said.

  Menoyo was clearly tense. The angry exchange with Che had stuck in his craw, and by all accounts, it wasn’t over. The Second Front continued to feel pressure to disband, he told Morgan. As long as they all wore their uniforms and carried their weapons, they were going to be targets.

  Menoyo was most concerned about Che and Raúl. “I don’t trust them,” he said. If Che had his way, he was going to ram his agrarian “reforms” down the throats of the Cubans. “He is a Communist,” Menoyo said.