THE YANKEE COMANDANTE

upset Morgan, she told him that she was
being held prisoner in their home, and
that she had little water or food. “No one
is allowed to visit,” she said. “The babies
are sick.”
Morgan urged her to flee—to get the
children out of Cuba before it was too
late. “If you can, go to Toledo,” he said.
“My mother will help you.”
He took her hand. “Everything’s
going to be O.K.,” he said. But Rodríguez,
who rarely betrayed fear, was scared.
“I was so worried about him and what
would happen to our baby girls,” she recalls.
After five minutes, the guards said
that her time was up.
“I love you with every part of me,” he
said. They stole a kiss before being
separated.
That night, when Rodríguez returned
home, she crushed sleeping pills into
hot chocolate and offered the drink to the
men guarding her. At two in the morning,
when all the guards appeared to be
asleep, she gathered her daughters.
“Hush,” she whispered to them. When
the baby began to cry, she gave her a toy,
and then, carrying both girls in her arms,
she crept out of the house. She went to the
Brazilian Embassy, where she was given
sanctuary after telling the Ambassador
and his wife, “Please, I’m in big trouble.”
Morgan was also trying to break free.
He studied the design of La Cabaña and
the routine of the guards, looking for a
flaw in the system. “Morgan had all kinds
of escape plots,” another prisoner later
told the C.I.A. Morgan worked to regain
his strength. A press attaché at the U.S.
Embassy later wrote, “Up at dawn, he
would put himself through calisthenics,
then march around the compound,
shouting commands at himself.” The inmate
who had given Morgan painkillers
recalled, “He exercised like an athlete and
marched like a soldier.” Morgan turned
increasingly toward his Catholic faith.
He wore a rosary and often prayed.
Hiram González, a twenty-four-yearold
revolutionary who had been arrested
for conspiring against the regime, had
just arrived at La Cabaña, and watched in
despair as prisoners were taken out and
killed by firing squads, while birds
swooped down to “peck at the bits of
bone, blood, and flesh.” Morgan, he recalls,
tried to cheer him up, offering his
mattress. When Morgan found him crying
in a corner, he went up to him and
said, “Chico, men don’t cry.”
“At times like this, I’m not a man.”
Morgan put his hand on his shoulder.
“If it helps your suffering, then it’s O.K.”
Morgan walked him around the prison
yard until he felt better. “He was the only
one to help,” González recalls.
Two days later, on March 9, 1961,
guards seized Morgan and escorted him
across the compound to a room where a
military tribunal was being held. Along
the way, Morgan, trying to summon
courage, murmured song lyrics to himself:
“Over hill, over dale, we have hit the
dusty trail/And those caissons go rolling
along.”
There were eleven other defendants at
the tribunal, including Carreras. Rodríguez
was tried in absentia. A few weeks
earlier, Che Guevara had published an
essay denouncing members of the Second
Front. “Revolutions, accelerated radical
social changes, are made of circumstances,”
he wrote. “They are made of
passions, of man’s fight for social vindication,
and are never perfect.” The mistake
of the Cuban Revolution, Guevara argued,
was its accommodation of men like
the Second Front commanders. “By their
presence, they showed us our sin—the sin
of compromise...in the face of the actual
or potential traitor, in the face of those
• •
weak in spirit, in the face of the coward.”
He went on, “Revolutionary conduct is
the mirror of revolutionary faith, and
when someone calls himself a revolutionary
and does not act as one, he can be
nothing more than heretical. Let them
hang together.”
At the trial, Morgan and Carreras
were charged with conspiracy and treason.
Later, Fabián Escalante, who served
for many years as the head of Cuban
counter-intelligence, detailed the case
against Morgan, claiming that he had
been a longtime American intelligence
operative—a “chameleon”—who, in
1960, had attempted to “organize, for the
C.I.A., a band of counter-revolutionaries
in the Escambray.”
Without a doubt, the C.I.A. was trying
to foment the new insurgency in the
mountains. But U.S. documents, which
have since been declassified, suggest
that Morgan was never a C.I.A. operative.
Indeed, an agency memorandum
dated October 5, 1960—two weeks before
Morgan’s arrest—voiced “strenuous
objections” to the idea of using him.
This followed an inquiry by Army intelligence,
which had concluded that
enlisting Morgan would be “extremely
worthwhile.” (The Army had considered
sending him a “secret writing system”—most
likely, one involving invisi-
THE NEW YORKER, MAY 28, 2012 67