THE YANKEE COMANDANTE

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ered something more unsettling. Morgan was not working for the agency or a foreign intelligence outfit or the Mob. He was out there on his own. “C WHY AM I HERE alling Comandante William Morgan! Comandante William Morgan!” It was one of his men in the Escambray, speaking on shortwave radio. “Hear me!” came Morgan’s reply. “Send us reinforcements. We need help—ammunition! If we stay here, they will wipe us out.” By the summer of 1958, Morgan had endured countless skirmishes. “We were always outnumbered at least thirty to one,” Morgan recalled. “We were a small outfit, but we were mobile and hard-hitting. We became known as the phantoms of the mountains.” Morgan had witnessed, up close, the cruelties of the Cuban regime: villages ransacked and burned by Batista’s Army, friends shot in the head, a senile man’s tongue cut out. “I know and have seen what these people have been doing,” Morgan said of Batista’s henchmen. “They killed. They tortured. They beat people...and done things that don’t have a name.” On one of his uniform sleeves, Morgan had sewn a U.S. flag. “I was born an American,” he liked to say. At night, he often sat by the campfire, where scattered sparks created fleeting constellations, and listened to the rebels share their visions of the revolution. The movement’s various factions—including two other groups in the Escambray and Castro’s forces in the Sierra Maestra— represented an array of ideologies and personal ambitions. The Escambray front advocated a Western-style democracy and was staunchly anti-Communist, a stance that was apparently shared by Fidel Castro, who, unlike his brother Raúl or Che Guevara, had expressed little interest in Marxism-Leninism. In the Sierra Maestra, Castro told a reporter, “I have never been, nor am I now, a Communist. If I were, I would have sufficient courage to proclaim it.” In the Escambray, Morgan and Menoyo had grown increasingly close. Morgan was older, and almost suicidally brave, like the brother of Menoyo’s who had died in the Batista raid. Morgan addressed Menoyo as “mi jefe y mi hermano”—“my chief and my brother”—and told him about his troubled past. Menoyo felt that Morgan was maturing, as a soldier and a man. “Little by little, William was changing,” Menoyo says. In July, after Morgan was promoted to comandante, he wrote a letter to his mother, something that he had not done during his six months in the mountains. Written with a distinctive flourish of dashes, it said, “I know that you neither approve or understand why I am here— even though you are the one person in the world—that I believe understands me—I have been many places—in my life and done many things of which you did not approve—or understand, nor did I understand myself—at the time.” He contended with his old sins, acknowledging how much pain he had caused Ellen, his second wife, and their children (“these three who I have hurt deeply”) by abandoning them. “It is hard to understand but I love them very deeply and think of them often,” he wrote. Ellen had filed for divorce, on the ground of desertion. “I don’t expect she has much faith or love for me any more,” Morgan wrote. “And probably she is right.” Yet he wanted his mother to understand that he was no longer the same person. “I am here with men and boys— who fight for . . . freedom,” he wrote. “And if it should happen that I am killed here—You will know it was not for foolish fancy—or as dad would say a pipe dream.” The friend who had also smuggled weapons to the rebels later told the Palm Beach Post, “He had found his cause in Cuba. He wanted something to believe in. He wanted to have a purpose. He wanted to be someone, not no one.” Morgan had composed a more philosophical statement about why he had joined the rebels. The essay, titled “Why Am I Here,” said: Why do I fight here in this land so foreign to my own? Why did I come here far from my home and family? Why do I worry about these men here in the mountains with me? Is it because they were all close friends of mine? No! When I came here they were strangers to me I could not speak their language or understand their problems. Is it because I seek adventure? No here there is no adventure only the ever existent problems of survive. So why am I here? I am here because I believe that the most important thing for free men to do is to protect the freedom of others. I am here so that my son when he is grown will not have to fight or die in a land not his own, because one man or group of men try to take his liberty from him I am here because I believe that free men should take up arms and stand together and fight and destroy the groups and forces that want to take the rights of people away. In his rush to overturn Cuba’s past as well as his own, Morgan often forgot to pause for periods or paragraph breaks. He acknowledged, “I can not say I have always been a good citizen.” But he explained that “being here I can appreciate the way of life that is ours from birth,” and he recounted the seemingly impossible things that he had seen: “Where a boy of nineteen can march 12 hours with a broken foot over country comparable to the american Rockies without complaint. Where a cigarette is smoked by ten men. Where men do without water so that others may drink.” Noting that U.S. policies had propped up Batista, he concluded, “I ask myself why do we support those who would destroy in other lands the ideals which we hold so dear?” Morgan sent the statement to someone he was sure would sympathize with it: Herbert Matthews. The Times reporter considered Morgan to be “the most interesting figure in the Sierra de Escambray.” Soon after receiving the statement, Matthews published an article about the Second Front and its “tough, uneducated young American” leader, citing a cleaned-up passage from Morgan’s letter. Other U.S. newspapers began chronicling the exploits of the “adventurous American,” the “swashbuckling Morgan.” The Washington Post reported that he had become a “daring fellow” by the age of three. The accounts were enough to “make schoolboys drool,” as one newspaper put it. A retired businessman from Ohio later told the Toledo Blade, “He was like a cowboy in an Ernest Hemingway adventure.” Morgan had finally willed his interior fictions into reality. One day in the spring of 1958, while Morgan was visiting a guerrilla camp for a meeting of the Second Front’s chiefs of staff, he encountered a rebel he had never seen before: small and slender, with a face shielded by a cap. Only up close was it evident that the rebel was a THE NEW YORKER, MAY 28, 2012 55
woman. She was in her early twenties, with dark eyes and tawny skin, and, to conceal her identity, she had cut her curly light-brown hair short and dyed it black. Though she had a delicate beauty, she locked and loaded a gun with the ease of a bank robber. Morgan later said of a pistol that she carried, “She knows how to use it.” Her name was Olga Rodríguez. She came from a peasant family, in the central province of Santa Clara, that often went without food. “We were so poor,” Rodríguez recalls. She studied diligently, and was elected class president. Her goal was to become a teacher. She was bright, stubborn, and questioning— as Rodríguez puts it, “always a little different.” Increasingly angered by the Batista regime’s repressiveness, she joined the underground resistance, organizing protests and assembling bombs until, one day, agents from Batista’s secret police appeared in her neighborhood, showing people her photograph. “They were coming to kill me,” Rodríguez recalls. When the secret police could not find her, they beat up her brother, heaving him on her parents’ doorstep “like a sack of potatoes,” she says. Her friends begged her to leave Cuba, but she told them, “I will not abandon my country.” In April, 1958, with her appearance disguised and with a tiny .32 pistol tucked in her underwear, she became the first woman to join the rebels in the Escambray. She tended to the wounded and taught rebels to read and write. “I have the spirit of a revolutionary,” she liked to say. When Morgan met her, he gently teased her about her haircut, pulling down her cap and saying, “Hey, muchacho.” Morgan had arrived at the camp literally riding a white horse, and she had felt her heart go “boom, boom, boom.” “I am a great romantic, and I was so moved that someone from another country would care enough about my countrymen to fight for them,” she says. Morgan repeatedly sought her out at her camp. She would sometimes prepare him rice and beans (“I’m a guerrilla, not a cook”), and he would complain, “Too fast!” as she spoke, in gunfire-patter Spanish, about the need to hold elections and build hospitals and schools. She seemed unlike so many of the women whom he had impetuously taken up with. Like his mother, she had a deep sense of conviction, and it was her influence, Menoyo says, that furthered “William’s transformation,” though Rodríguez saw it differently: Morgan was not so much changing as discovering who he really was. “I knew William had not always been a saint,” Rodríguez says. “But inside, I could tell, he had a huge heart—one that he had opened not just to me but to my country.” Morgan recognized the risk of surrendering to a flight of emotion in the midst of war. The Batista regime had placed a twenty-thousand-dollar bounty on him—“dead or alive,” as Morgan put it. Once, when Morgan and Rodríguez were together, a military plane shut down its engines, so that they could not hear its approach until bombs were falling upon them. “We simply had to dive for cover,” Rodríguez recalls. They barely escaped unharmed. During other bombing raids, they would hold each other, whispering, “Our fates are intertwined.” When Robert Jordan is overcome with love for a woman during the Spanish Civil War, he fears that they will never experience what ordinary people do: “Not time, not happiness, not fun, not children, not a house, not a bathroom, not a clean pair of pajamas, not the morning paper, not to wake up together, not to wake and know she’s there and that you’re not alone. No. None of that.” As long as Morgan was fighting in the Escambray, there could be no past or future—only the present. “We could never have peace,” Rodríguez says. “From the beginning, I had this terrible feeling that things would not end well.” Yet the impossibility of their romance only deepened their ardor. Not long after they met, a boy from a nearby village approached Rodríguez in camp, carrying a bunch of purple wildflowers. “Look what the Americano has sent you,” the boy told her. A few days later, the boy appeared again, holding a new bouquet. “From the Americano,” he said. As Morgan later told her, they had to “steal time.” In one such moment, a photographer caught them standing in a mountain clearing. In the image, both are wearing fatigues; a rifle is slung over his right shoulder, and she leans on one, as if it were a cane. With their free hands, they are clutching each other. “When I found you, I found everything I can wish for in the world,” he later wrote her. “Only death can separate us.” ORGAN WAS KILLED THE PREVI- “M OUS NIGHT IN THE COURSE OF A FIGHT WITH THE CUBAN ARMY.” So read an urgent cable sent from the U.S. Embassy in Havana to Hoover, at F.B.I. headquarters, on September 19, 1958. The Batista regime, which had already leaked the news to the Cuban press, mailed the F.B.I. two photographs of a fractured corpse, shirtless and smeared with blood. Morgan’s mother was devastated when she heard of the reports. Several weeks later, she received a letter from Cuba, in Morgan’s hand. It said, “The Cuban press last month sent out word that I was dead but as you can tell I am not.” Just as Batista’s regime had falsely declared Castro’s death, it had made the mistake of believing its own propaganda about Morgan, becoming trapped in the closed circuit of information that isolates tyrants not only from their countrymen but from reality. Meanwhile, Morgan’s seeming emergence from the dead, like one of Mulholland’s magical feats, created a potent counter-illusion: that he was indestructible. In October, Che Guevara arrived in the Escambray, with a hundred or so ghostly-looking soldiers. They had completed a six-week westward trek from the Sierra Maestra, withstanding cyclones and enemy fire and sleeping in swamps. Guevara described his men as “morally broken, starving...their feet bloodied and so swollen they won’t fit into what’s left of their boots.” Guevara— whom another rebel once depicted as “half athletic and half asthmatic,” and prone to shifting in conversation “between Stalin and Baudelaire”—had dark hair nearly to his shoulders. During the march, he had worn the cap of a dead comrade, but, to his distress, he had lost it, and so he began wearing a black beret. The ranks of the Second Front had grown to more than a thousand men. Morgan wrote to his mother, “We are much stronger now,” and said that his men were “getting ready to come down from the hills and take the cities.” Guevara had been sent to the Escambray to take control of the Second Front, 56 THE NEW YORKER, MAY 28, 2012
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THE YANKEE COMANDANTE

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