The sun had not yet appeared in the early morning hours of March 12, 1961, when the gringo American Comandante Morgan is placed against the stone wall of La Cabana Prison in Havana. The Catholic priest leads him in a short prayer. Meanwhile, the Cuban soldiers prepare their guns for a volley of bullets that will end the life of the only American rebel to rise to the army’s rank of Comandante in the fight for the Cuban revolution and Fidel Castro.
Why is an American so willing to die for Cuba’s revolution?
Morgan wants to be both on the side of good and on the edge of danger. Also, he wants something else: revenge. It turns out that Morgan’s American buddy, Jack Turner, is killed by Batista’s soldiers in Havana. Turner caught smuggling weapons to the rebels, is tortured and then tossed to the sharks by Batista’s men.
So, in December 1957, a 29-year-old gringo wanderer named William Morgan from Ohio arrives in Havana. He comes to Cuba following a lifelong quest for adventure that leads him to join forces with a Cuban Revolutionary named Fidel Castro.
Upon arrival, his first night in Havana is filled with all sorts of vices.
Publicized as the “Playland of the Americas,” Havana offers one attraction after another. The Sans Souci nightclub, with its outdoor stages, has dancers swinging to the cha cha under the stars; the Hotel Capri slot machines pay out Benjamin Franklin silver dollars; and the Tropicana, where Elizabeth Taylor and Marlon Brando enjoy exotic performers while drinking the best Cuban rum drinks in town. Sex with young girls can be had at any time and anywhere.
Morgan, a slightly overweight twenty-nine-year-old, tries to blend in as just another man looking for a good time. He wears a $250 white suit with a white shirt, and a pair of new shoes. “I looked like a real fat-cat tourist,” he jokes. Morgan’s real temptation, however, is to join the ragtag group of Cuban fighters in the mountains of the Sierra Maestra. He’s looking to join up with Fidel Castro.
William Alexander Morgan is born in Cleveland, Ohio, on April 19, 1928. Even though he comes from wealthy parents, Morgan is a teenager always in trouble.
During the summer of 1943, at the age of fifteen, Morgan runs away from home. Although Morgan returns home a few days later, he steals his father’s car and “takes off” again, blowing through a red light before the police catch him. He is sent to a detention center but slips out a window and vanishes again.
Morgan ends up in Chicago and joins the Ringling Brothers circus as an elephant caretaker, until his father finds him 10 days later.
In the ninth grade, Morgan drops out of school and begins roaming the country, hopping buses and freighters; he earns money as a punch-press operator, a grocery clerk, a ranch hand, a coal loader, a movie-theatre usher, and a seaman in the Merchant Marine. His father is resigned to his son’s rebelliousness, telling him in a letter, “Get as much adventure as you can and we will be glad to see you whenever you decide you want to come home.”
Morgan’s expelled from four high schools, frequently runs away from home and is locked up on felony charges, all before his 16th birthday. Shortly after his 17th birthday, he’s detained in San Antonio, Texas, returned to Toledo, Ohio, and then arrested for armed robbery.
After Morgan turns 18, he enlists in the Army. He boards a train for California, where he sits beside beautiful Darlene Edgerton. She later admits, “ I was coming home to marry someone else, and we just hit it off and so we stopped off in Reno and got married.” They had known each other for only twenty-four hours and spent two days in a hotel before getting back on a train. When they reach California, Morgan reports to the base and leaves for Japan. With Morgan stationed in Japan, the marriage dissolves after a year and a half, and Edgerton gets an annulment.
After taking basic and advanced infantry training, Morgan ships out to the Atsugi Army-Air Force base in Japan. Following only a few weeks in Japan, Morgan marries an attractive German-Japanese woman who works as a hostess in a nightclub. A short while later, Morgan goes AWOL at least twice and is court-martialed on November 7, 1947. He’s then thrown into the Kyoto stockade for three months but promptly escapes after overpowering a guard and stealing his uniform and weapon. After being recaptured again, he’s found guilty of escape, assault and robbery, and sentenced to five years of hard labor.
Morgan is released on April 11, 1950.
Following his release from prison, Morgan takes up a life on the road. His wanderings take him all over the United States.
By 1957, the couple has two children together, a son, William Jr., and a girl, Anna. But being a father does not deter Morgan’s desire to travel and, after not finding work, he starts to disappear for months at a time, leaving his family to live with his parents.
During this same time, Havana has become the pleasure-seeking playground for the world’s elite, producing big gambling, prostitution and drug profits for the American Mafia.
All sorts of drugs, from marijuana to cocaine, are plentiful everywhere in Havana. In the fancy hotels and casinos along Cuba’s beaches, it’s easy to find U.S. narcotics officials and congressmen socializing with mafia mastermind Meyer Lansky and crime boss Santo Trafficante, Jr. They both are responsible for the redevelopment of Cuba’s hotel and casino business with over a $100 million investment.
In 1956, Morgan begins showing up in Tampa, Florida, and points further south in the Florida Keys. For about 16 months, he works for a gun running outfit that transports guns to Cuba. At times he travels between Tampa, Miami, and Houston, Texas. The gun running business is bank rolled by Robert McKeown, a Texas-based businessman and convicted gunrunner, who in 1957, had been deported from Cuba by Batista. It is with McKeown that Morgan befriends one of McKeon’s good buddies, Jack Ruby.
McKeown is also a close friend of former Cuban President Carlos Prio, whom he allegedly helps flee with $300 million into the U.S. when Prio moves to Miami from Cuba. McKeown is also very close with Fidel Castro. In 1959, on a visit to Houston, Castro goes out of his way to meet with McKeown at the Shamrock Hotel.
While in South Florida, Morgan arranges large shipments of Cuba-bound arms and is in contact with the militant group Directoro Revolucinario, which operates with CIA support. It’s here in Miami that Morgan becomes acquainted with Roger Rodriguez who promises to help him become a rebel fighter in the Cuban revolutionary movement.
At this same time, Morgan has contacts with CIA operatives that include future-Watergate burglars Howard Hunt and Frank Sturgis, and Mafia go-between Johnny Rosselli.
Morgan is the perfect adventurer and is easily drawn into Fidel’s fight in Cuba.
In February 1958, Morgan finds his way to Cuba’s lush highlands in the Escambray Mountains looking to join up with the anti-Batista rebels headquartered there.
Upon arriving in the jungle camp, Morgan immediately comes under suspicion of working for the CIA. Rebel leaders argue over whether Morgan could stay, as many rebels fear he is an infiltrator and want to send him back to Havana. The rebels do everything possible to make him leave. During the next several days, they march Morgan endlessly up and down the mountainsides. He’s so fat, one rebel jokes, that he has to be C.I.A.
Morgan, famished and fatigued, repeatedly hollers as the rebels lead him into a patch of prickly poisonous shrubs, which sting like wasps and cause his chest and face to become terribly inflamed. Morgan can no longer sleep at night. When he removes his sweaty white shirt, they see awful welts and rash caused by their treatment.
Morgan endures whatever ordeal the rebels subject him to, shedding thirty-five pounds along the way. He later writes that he had become unrecognizable.
The men agree that the gringo is tough, and they now admire his persistence. He is allowed to stay and assist with training.
Morgan learns Spanish, becomes a full member of the group, which is dubbed the Second National Front of the Escambray. Like the other rebels, Morgan takes an oath to “fight and defend with my life this little piece of free territory,” to “guard all the war secrets,” and to “denounce traitors.”
Within a few weeks, “the gringo from Ohio” is leading rebel bands in intense attacks against Batista’s troops and is quickly is promoted to major in the National Second Front of the Escambray. Fidel Castro admires Morgan and says he’s “the kind of American that Cuba needs.”
As Morgan wins more battles, the news of his curious presence begin filtering out. A Cuban rebel radio station reports that rebels “led by an American” kill forty Batista soldiers. Another broadcast hails a “Yankee fighting for the liberty of Cuba.” The Miami newspaper Diario Las Américas falsely states that the American is a “member of the ‘Rangers’ who landed in Normandy and opened the way to the Allied forces by destroying the Nazi installations on the French coast before D Day.”
By the summer of 1958, Morgan has survived countless skirmishes. “We are always outnumbered at least thirty to one,” Morgan recalls. “We are a small outfit, but we’re mobile and hard-hitting.”
U.S. and Cuban intelligence agents also begin picking up radio chatter about a Yankee commando. That same summer, the C.I.A. reports whispers of a rebel, identified only as ‘El Americano,’ who plays a critical role in “planning and carrying out guerrilla activities,” and who virtually wipes out a Batista unit while leading his men in an ambush. An informant from a Cuban revolutionary group tells the F.B.I. that El Americano is Morgan. Another said that Morgan “risks his life many times” to save the rebels, and is considered “quite a hero among these forces for bravery and daring.” The reports eventually set off a rush among U.S. government agencies — including the C.I.A., the Secret Service, the State Department, Army intelligence, and the F.B.I.—to determine who William Alexander Morgan is and for whom he is really working.
As news of his deeds trickles out, Morgan becomes an international superstar and media favorite. New York Times reporter Herbert L. Matthews, who nicknames Morgan “the Yanqui Commandante,” writes stories of his feats.
Many young Americans worship Morgan, including a Marine named Lee Harvey Oswald. Like Morgan, Oswald is stationed in Japan at the Atsugi base.
In August 1959, Oswald tells fellow Marine Nelson Delgado that Morgan is his hero. Further, Oswald suggests to Delgado that they both go to Cuba and “outdo Maj. Morgan.” Delgado, a Cuban-American, reports that Oswald actually writes to and visits the Cuban consulate in Los Angeles.
In September 1959, the U.S. State Department revokes William Morgan’s citizenship based on a section of the Immigration and Nationality Act that forbids U.S. citizens to serve in foreign armies. Morgan is shocked by the action. He argues that he has never done anything against the interests of the U.S.
But, several months prior, Morgan publicly claims that he will “kill any American Marines” who try to invade Cuba or to interfere with Castro’s government.
After the fighting is over, Morgan decides to settle down and raise a family.
With a $70,000 loan from Cuba’s Agricultural Ministry, he and Olga develop a frog farm. By early 1960, they have nearly a half million croaking frogs ready for export. But the past will haunt Morgan and not leave him alone.
Castro arrests Morgan on October 16, 1960. The charges against him to this day remain vague but appear to be his perceived betrayal of Castro. Some Cuban officials say bluntly that Morgan is “a traitor” to his adopted country, reminding people that the American is officially a Cuban citizen that Castro has given to him.
Many in Cuba believe, Morgan is “a freedom fighter” who, for the sake of “political expediency,” is “betrayed by U.S. Ambassador to Cuba Philip Bonsal.” To support this charge, they point to once-secret State Department documents that reveal that, shortly before Morgan’s arrest, Bonsal covertly sends word to Castro that Morgan is organizing a secret army to push Castro from power.
After his arrest, Morgan is kept in Havana’s La Cabana prison, where he is tried and sentenced to death. Morgan isn’t the only American held in La Cabana. There are others, including John V. Martino.
Morgan tells Martino that he decided to conspire against Castro sometime during “the early months of 1960,” after the U.S. government took his citizenship away. He further tells Martino that he made several secret trips to the U.S. and then said: “Men have been infiltrating into Cuba for two or three months now. They are working closely with the CIA.”
Morgan then tells him that he informed Castro about his being recruited for counter-revolutionary aims and that he had agreed, at Castro’s request, to “go along with the plot to find out what was really behind it.”
On March 12, 1961, William Morgan is executed, one month before 1,500 U.S.-backed counter-revolutionaries invade Cuba at the Bay of Pigs.
As rays of floodlights shine on William Morgan, shots ring out and the adventurous story of the Gringo Comandante comes to an abrupt end.