William Morgan was about to head into a foreign country that was sliding into a revolution. He didn’t know a soul. He didn’t speak the language. He knew nothing about the rebels or the dictator.
And yet, he would soon be boarding an airplane for Havana with everything he owned clenched in his hand.
As he walked into the concourse of Miami International Airport, he looked over and spotted Chao and some others gathered at the gate, all waiting to board the same flight.
For Chao, it was risky to bring Morgan. If he turned out to be a government agent, they could all be in danger. But if Morgan was truthful, he could bring much to the conflict. At twenty-nine, he was older than most of the rebels in the mountains, and with his army training, he could be invaluable.
God knows, they needed some military knowledge.
The young people heading to the mountains knew nothing about combat and even less about guerrilla warfare. Nada. And that’s what the war in Cuba was about. They had never fired M1s. Or lived in the brush for days on end. Most of them had never killed a man. They did not know what it was like to watch someone’s head explode from rapid fire or their guts spill out from a .12-gauge shotgun blast.
It was just a matter of time.
Their generation was like so many others in Cuba that had spawned revolutions over the past hundred years. It happened during the war of independence, when thousands of young Cubans took up arms against the Spanish at the dawn of the twentieth century. No one inspired the youth more than the legendary José Marti, the poet warrior who died in the conflict.
Then there was the revolt against President Gerardo Machado three decades later—eventually leading to the bloodless coup that brought in Batista. The cult of the pistolero would become a rite of passage, a kind of machismo that inspired each generation to rub out the last.
Morgan had only known Chao a few days, but already he could see the blond-haired, blue-eyed Cuban had taken up the torch. Chao and his friends could have been doing anything—going to the beach, getting an education, getting laid—but instead were restless to go home.
Chao’s mother moved to Miami to get her brood away from the political turmoil of their country—the classic immigrant story—but the young Cubans weren’t interested in blending into the American tapestry. They wanted to move back.
Chao stood next to the others at the gate, the veins bulging in his neck as he jabbed a finger in the air to make another point. As Morgan watched the young Cubano, he saw glimpses of himself as a younger man. “The Americanito,” as Chao was called, was like a jitterbug ready to throw himself into the fire.
Maybe, just maybe, Morgan could recover what he had lost. He could reclaim what had slipped away. He gripped his suitcase as he walked to the tarmac. It was late December, 1957. Morgan had no idea at that point whether he’d ever come back. He was about to bolt into the sky with thirteen young men to fight an entrenched army that was hell-bent on wiping out every last one of them.