Cuba was forging official ties with the Soviet Union. Castro had finally pulled the plug on democracy.
Morgan shouldn’t have been surprised, but he was. He had watched Castro insist that he wanted nothing to do with Communism, that Cuba was fighting to become an independent state. Now he wasn’t just meeting with the Soviets, he was sending the Second Front’s old rival, Faure Chomón Mediavilla, as ambassador to Moscow.
Olga watched as Morgan stood near the television. He had spent days with his men toiling at the hatchery, trying to stay above the politics. He had tried to keep the young rebels in his command under control even when they wanted to take a more active role in antigovernment activities. He had already heard the news, but seeing it on the screen made him even angrier.
Menoyo tried to contain his feelings, but the move clearly distressed him, as it did Fleites and Carreras. No military unit opposed Communism more than the Second Front. They had stated this position publicly. They had even expressed their sentiments to Castro. Most of them knew Fidel was still seething over La Coubre, but they thought he would wait until the investigation concluded. He had no proof that America pulled the trigger.
With night falling on the harbor, Morgan motioned for the men to follow him to his living room. This was a conversation that only the comandantes could have. The Second Front needed to take precautions. It couldn’t wait for the government to make its next move. It was time to hide weapons in the mountains. It didn’t mean war. It didn’t mean they were going to launch an attack. But they had to start arming themselves in a larger way.
None of the men disagreed. Carreras had been edging to leave the fold and join the younger rebels who were starting to gather for meetings with the growing opposition movement. Fleites had maintained a dialogue with Castro, agreeing to meet with the Cuban leader periodically—but no more. Morgan already had placed a stash of machine guns and grenades at the hatchery, but he would haul in even more weapons.
In one night, everything had changed.
For much of her pregnancy, Olga felt sick, but as she sat in the passenger seat and watched Morgan drive, she grew alarmed. For most of the morning, his hands were shaking, and his face was red. She had tried to get him to pull over and let an escort in the backseat drive, but he refused.
They had stopped to visit her parents in Santa Clara and were driving eastward along the main highway when he started to feel faint. Olga had warned him that he had been pushing himself beyond his limits without enough rest, but he wasn’t listening. Every morning, he had been getting up at sunrise, packing his car, and heading to the hatchery. He drove home an hour or two after nightfall, or on some nights even slept in the main building. Now that he was collecting guns, Olga was even more concerned.
“You are going to kill yourself,” she told him.
As the sun began to glare off the windshield, Olga looked up to see they were passing through the town of Florida in Camagüey Province. Shopkeepers had just started to put their wares on the sidewalks in front of their businesses.
There were few places in Cuba where Morgan was not recognized. No sooner did they sit down at a restaurant than a man ran up to their table. There was trouble. The police in Camagüey had picked up Elio Lopez. The messenger didn’t know why he was in jail, but he suspected that it might have to do with anti-Castro activities. Lopez, one of the Second Front men, was young, impetuous, and angry about how the new government had slighted the rebel group.
When Morgan stood up, Olga could tell he was weak, but he would never leave one of his men in jail. Grabbing his Sten, he motioned for his escorts to follow him to the car. It was like being in the mountains again: Morgan and his men were about to head the soldiers off at the pass.
When they arrived at the jail a half hour later, Lopez’s father was waiting outside.
“Don’t worry,” Morgan said to him. “We are getting him out.”
Morgan headed for the superintendent’s office, followed by his men. The guards recognized him immediately.
“Comandante,” they said, stepping out of his way.
“I want you to release Elio Lopez now,” he said.
The guards, ashen, didn’t want a fight with the Americano. One of the supervisors explained that the police were holding Lopez and that they couldn’t let him go. Morgan ignored him. He demanded to see Lopez.
The guard obliged, sending men to retrieve the prisoner. Moments later, Lopez came out.
“You’re coming with me,” Morgan said.
Without any resistance, the guards let Lopez go. Morgan was a comandante and had the power to order his release. But that didn’t mean the G2, Castro’s secret police, wouldn’t hunt him down once they knew he was gone. Morgan needed to get him out of there. He headed to downtown Camagüey to secure rooms in a hotel.
With a beet-red face and glazed eyes, Morgan was still struggling. If he didn’t see a doctor, he could die. Olga had never seen him this ill before. Morgan insisted he was OK, but as soon as he stepped into his hotel room, he crashed to the floor. Olga dropped to her knees to help him—but this time he wasn’t getting up.
The doctors couldn’t figure it out.
The ambulance had rushed him to the hospital. The doctors had hooked an IV into his arm and strapped an oxygen mask to his face. Morgan’s blood pressure was so high that he shouldn’t have been able to function. His vital signs were off the charts, and he was suffering from severe exhaustion.
For the most part, Olga and Morgan had dealt with the pressure of the last year, but they finally reached their limits. Maybe it was the decision to move the guns. Maybe it was the government scrutiny of the Second Front. Maybe it was that Morgan had become de facto leader of the unit. All of it was taking its toll. He had been smoking more and pacing the floors. He had been waking up with circles under his eyes and shortness of breath. He was just thirty-one years old, but he looked a decade older.
The doctor was blunt: If Morgan didn’t rest and reduce his stress, he’d die. The fever, chills, and chest pains were all signs that he was driving himself into the ground.
Morgan just nodded. He’d try to get some sleep, but he wasn’t going to stay long. He had to leave by morning.
Olga walked to the side of the bed and placed her hand on his forehead. He always had been the stronger one. He always tended to her when she was ill. Now, curled up under the covers, he looked helpless. She wished they could stay here; she didn’t even want to return to Havana. Morgan promised her that he would rest—but he couldn’t stop himself. Olga had no idea how it all was going to end. And that worried her the most.
The next morning, Morgan hobbled out of his hospital bed. He couldn’t stay. It didn’t matter that he was still shaking, or that his temperature was still above normal. He was leaving. After promising the doctors he would find a place to rest, Morgan and Olga walked out.
Instead of returning to Havana, they went to Santa Clara. They had been in the hotel room only for a short time when Second Front rebels pounded on the door. The men knew that Morgan had just been released from the hospital, but this was critical: Jesús Carreras had been thrown in jail.
Castro’s leaders despised Carreras, but he was still a comandante. Orders to arrest someone of his rank could come only from the top. Morgan tried to contain himself. He remembered what the doctor had told him: Rest . . . but not now. Among the Second Front leadership, Carreras was the least popular among the new government leaders, especially Che.
Morgan couldn’t just leave Carreras in jail. First, he had to make sure Olga stood out of harm’s way. He needed to drive her back to Havana so she could rest. Then he would return with more of his men.
Within minutes, he contacted Menoyo on the radio. Morgan needed to reach Castro. He didn’t care if it took all day; he wanted to talk to Fidel personally. It wasn’t just to help Carreras but to let the government know the Second Front was united. T
he truth is, Morgan and Carreras hadn’t always seen eye to eye. Carreras was quick to get angry and brood, and these days it was happening more and more. Carreras, on the other hand, thought Morgan had gone too far to placate the new government and hadn’t demanded enough of Castro.
Whatever their differences, Morgan was determined to get Carreras out. Rather than wait, he decided to check out and drive Olga back to Havana himself.
He was growing angrier. The more he thought about it, the more he believed the government was starting to move on the rebels. A couple of days ago, it was Elio Lopez. Now Jesús Carreras, a comandante.
“We could be next,” he told Olga.
Menoyo called back. Castro was willing to talk.
When Morgan pulled the car up to their apartment building in Havana, his men were waiting. Morgan saw Olga safely inside and then phoned Castro. At first, Castro said he didn’t know all the details but that he would look into it and call Morgan back.
Despite Castro’s assurances, Morgan was going to formulate a backup plan. He had learned more about what happened to Carreras. Police investigating a shooting arrested both him and his driver. Though details remained sketchy, the cops released the driver but were holding Carreras in a brig in Santa Clara. It was hard for Morgan to believe that Castro didn’t know, but ultimately it didn’t matter. Morgan wasn’t going to wait around.
He ordered the men to get ready to make the trip to Santa Clara. They were going to be taking two cars, but they would also be toting their guns.
Castro never called. Morgan had slept by the phone, waiting. He had hoped to get word that Carreras would be freed or at least more information on his arrest.
After talking to his men, he finally made the decision. They were leaving for Santa Clara. It was time to load the cars with machine guns and semiautomatic rifles. The plan was simple: If the jailers wouldn’t let Carreras go, Morgan and his men would conduct their own commando raid.
“We had all the guns in the trunks of the cars,” Ossorio recalled. “We were really going to attack.”
First, they’d take the superintendent as a hostage. Then they’d storm the wing of the jail where Carreras was held. They weren’t going to leave without him.
For the entire drive from Havana to Santa Clara, Morgan railed about Castro and his broken promises. Morgan and Carreras had fought together from the beginning, when the unit had fewer than two dozen rebels. They had fought at each other’s side, and each had risen to lead his own column. No matter their differences, the bonds they had forged in war amid blood and sweat made them brothers. Carreras had fought and risked his life, just like Castro. He deserved the same respect.
As they spotted the regiment jail, the men gripped their weapons. The cars halted, Morgan bolted from the driver’s seat, and his men frantically followed. When he pushed open the door to the superintendent’s office, the guards jumped. Morgan demanded to see Comandante Carreras.
The chief jailer responded that he understood Morgan’s order, but the G2 had put a special hold on the prisoner. Morgan wasn’t budging. He told the jailer the order wasn’t coming just from himself. He had spoken to Castro personally.
The jailer looked quizzically at Morgan and his men. The jailer hadn’t heard anything from Castro, but he didn’t have time to call anyone. Morgan was a comandante and he had spoken. The chief jailer ordered his guards to fetch Carreras.
Moments later, Carreras walked in.
“You are coming with me,” Morgan said.
Without waiting, the Second Front men gathered around Carreras and exited together.
As they drove away, Morgan turned to Carreras and said, “I had no pass to get you out of there. Nada.” Both men laughed, but everything had changed. That the police could jail a comandante from the Second Front told them all they needed to know.
43
Olga opened her eyes just wide enough to make out the nurse carrying the tiny bundle in her arms. The last thing she remembered was being wheeled into the delivery room with Morgan and the escorts waiting in the hall outside. It all had happened so quickly. One minute, she was shopping in a grocery store, and the next, her escorts were rushing her to the hospital.
She reached up and took the baby into her arms.
“Congratulations,” the nurse said, “you have another daughter.”
Pulling back the covers, Olga smiled as she gazed at the tiny infant in her arms. She and Morgan had already agreed that if she had a girl they would name her Olga. For a moment, she forgot about everything: the arrests, the guns, Morgan’s health.
The last nine months had been the most difficult of her life. But looking down on the little baby on her chest, she was overwhelmed. It had been a long time since she had felt this much peace. She barely noticed that Morgan was standing over her, smiling. He leaned down and kissed her and then grabbed her hand.
“A baby girl,” he said.
The last thing Olga remembered him saying was that they were going to have a son. But Olga knew her husband couldn’t resist any baby—boy or girl. Morgan gently kissed his infant daughter and held Olga’s hand. He kidded that they would have more children and he would “finally get my boy.”
But Olga stopped him. “Come closer,” she said. “I want to tell you something.”
He leaned over.
“We don’t have any more time,” she said. “Remember that we are in the middle of serious problems. Very soon we will have to take another road.”
She was right, but Morgan didn’t want her to dwell on their problems, not now. “You get some rest,” he said. He wanted her to be at ease for one moment at least. Soon enough it was all going to change.
Before sundown, Roger Redondo had all the information he needed. The old cargo ship sat docked in the hidden port. The men aboard had unloaded the containers already. No one was supposed to know the origin of the ship, not the dockworkers nor the townspeople. But Redondo knew everything.
After thanking his sources, he sped toward Havana. He always prided himself on turning up actionable intelligence for the Second Front, whether locating an enemy company in the mountains or tracking down desperately needed rifles. This was different.
Most of the information was sketchy, but Redondo learned that the ship that had just slipped into the port near Trinidad belonged to the Soviets. No one knew where the vessel had last departed, but men speaking Russian had been seen getting off the boat. Russians rarely if ever ventured into this part of the country. Soviet cargo went to Havana.
More details surfaced when one of the men from the boat made a trip to the sprawling sanitarium, Topes de Collantes, fifteen miles away. Angelito Martinez, a Spanish Communist who fought in the Spanish Civil War and later taught military tactics to the Russian army in World War II, had gone to the director’s office demanding that the hospital’s cook prepare food for the men on his cargo ship.
At first, the kitchen manager refused. “The sick eat first, and then we’ll see what we can do for you,” he said.
Martinez, whose real name was Francisco Ciutat de Miguel, was fifty-one years old, and he wasn’t used to being rebuffed. He ordered that his men be fed and fed immediately.
Redondo needed to get word to Morgan. Soviet diplomats in Havana were no surprise. But Soviet military advisers showing up in a remote area of southern Cuba—a direct threat to the Second Front—certainly was.
Redondo told Morgan everything, including the Soviet agent’s demands at the sanitarium. As expected, Morgan bristled. Russian military advisers could have set foot in the country only at the open invitation of Fidel Castro. Worse, the presence of Communist military leaders in Cuba could mean only one thing: They were training Cuban soldiers.
“That son of a bitch,” Morgan said.
He had tried to put everything aside for the benefit of his men and his family. He had promised Olga that they would live in pea
ce. But he couldn’t do it anymore—not in light of what he had just learned. This wasn’t just Castro’s country. It belonged to the people of Cuba. It belonged to the farmers and the workers. They all had fought a revolution for democracy, and now it was falling apart.
The Second Front had to go to war again.
Morgan, Olga, Loretta, and Olguita Courtesy of Morgan Family Collection
For most of the night, the baby had been crying. Olga walked back and forth between the nursery and the bedroom. Ever since arriving home from the hospital, she hadn’t been able to sleep. Morgan had been at the hatchery until late and then came home and met with his men on the balcony.
After an hour, Olga pulled her husband into their room. “No secrets, commander,” she said.
Morgan knew he couldn’t keep anything from Olga. She knew him better than anyone. But still, this wasn’t easy. He told her about the Soviet infiltration in the mountains and what it meant for all of them. They couldn’t stand by and watch Cuba being swept into the Communist vortex. He had tried to live in Cuba in peace. No one knew more than Olga all the work and care he had put into the hatchery to make a stable living.
But everything they had fought for was at stake. There was no way they could compromise with what they had just discovered. They couldn’t stay in their home. They were no longer just raising fish and frogs at the hatchery. They were storing guns there and moving them to the mountains.
“We have to move against them,” he said.
Olga recalled throwing her arms around him. No one wanted to live in peace as much as she did. She was the mother of two children. But she not only understood everything Morgan was saying to her, she completely agreed. They had met in the revolution. They had married in the revolution. If need be, they would die in the revolution.
“I am with you,” Olga said.
The Yankee Comandante Page 21