The rebels gathered with their rifles. Some were teenagers who had dropped out of school; others were in their forties, right out of the fields. One by one, they stepped to the line.
“Listos! ” came the first command. “Aspunten! ” And finally: “Fuego! ”
With every order, they followed the three steps. Ready, aim, fire. Some of the shots splintered the tree, others barely grazed the branches. Most of the men had no weapons training, and the rifle’s kickback was throwing them off.
Standing in the rear of the camp, Morgan could see the frustration on Menoyo’s face. The Second Front didn’t have enough weapons, and most of the new volunteers were inexperienced fighters.
Morgan set down the gun he was cleaning and strode to the firing line. He was supposed to wait his turn, like everyone else, but he couldn’t help himself.
“Mira,” he said. Look.
Taking an M1 from one of the rebels, he held the rifle in front of him and yanked on the sling to make sure everyone saw his grip. Wrapping the strap around his shoulder, he lined up the rear and front sights. Squinting, he took aim, and then—bracing his hold with the sling—squeezed the trigger. The bullet struck the tree dead center. No one said a word. Some had seen what he had done in the skirmishes at Finca Diana, the crazy Americano walking toward the gunfire.
Most of the rebels nodded with approval, but one stood in the rear, glaring over the other rebels’ shoulders. Regino Camacho Santos—a Spaniard from the Canary Islands—grew up among people whose distrust of Americans had run deep since the Spanish-American War. He wanted nothing to do with them. It was difficult enough for him to watch Morgan wearing the fatigues of the Second Front, but the Yanqui was butting in where he didn’t belong. Camacho, a veteran of the Spanish Civil War, was supposed to be the training officer, and he was being upstaged by a foreigner. As Morgan coaxed the rebels to the firing line, the Spaniard made a snide comment loud enough for others to hear.
Menoyo watched but didn’t say anything—for now. The men needed time to accept Morgan, who was more than capable of helping them. The American may not have been one of the training officers, but he knew how to fire a weapon. This revolution was more than student protests. It was a war, and they desperately needed to learn how to fight.
One of the young rebels stepped to the line. Morgan adjusted the boy’s rifle strap to make sure it was taut. The tighter the strap, the more support and the less kickback. “No look at me,” Morgan told him, pointing to the tree.
The young man held the rifle and then fired. The bullet glanced a small branch.
“Bueno,” Morgan said, smiling.
Camacho made another comment loud enough for everyone to hear and stormed off. It wasn’t over between the two men, but the rebels were starting to warm up to the Americano.
Later that night, the men gathered around the camp. Sometimes, they told stories, sharing a rolled cigarette. Other times, they passed around an orange that someone picked off a tree. This time, they wanted to wrestle, squaring off to see who could pin whom. As Morgan watched the men size each other up to see who wanted to tussle, Camacho came over to him.
“Vamos a luchar,” he said, pointing to the center of the camp. Let’s fight.
Morgan smiled. Did he really want to wrestle? In front of everyone? Camacho didn’t know that in Ohio Morgan had spent hours wrestling under the porch lights on summer nights. For a street kid, he was tough and knew every basic move, from sweeps and takedowns to full nelsons. He was bigger than Camacho and, in his own estimation, stronger.
Morgan didn’t say anything, but Camacho wasn’t going to leave it alone. Raising his voice, he made sure everyone in the camp heard him. “Vamos a luchar! ” he said.
Morgan was blending into the unit, and he didn’t want to upset anyone, but this crazy training officer, a hotheaded Spaniard with a chip on his shoulder, was goading him openly.
Everyone was looking now. Morgan had to defend his honor. He walked into the center of the camp where the others were standing and slowly unbuttoned his shirt. No sooner had he tossed it to the ground than Camacho snorted and lunged at him, trying to knock him over. Morgan stepped aside and let the Spaniard fly by and fall to the ground.
Some of the rebels laughed as Camacho, red faced, rose and ran at Morgan again, determined to bowl him over. Morgan again stepped to the side, but this time, he caught Camacho as he ran by, turned him around, and wrapped his arms around him in a bear hug. Morgan’s face turned red, squeezing Camacho until his face, too, turned bright red. For a moment, no one said anything as Camacho began gasping for breath, unable to talk. After a few seconds, Morgan flung Camacho around and slammed him to the ground, dropping a karate chop that stopped just inches from his head.
The rebels were speechless. Camacho, the tough guy of the unit—a demolitions expert who had fought against Franco’s soldiers—lay on his back. Morgan rose from his stance over Camacho, brushed the dirt from his fatigues, and stepped back. He wasn’t going to gloat. As far as he was concerned, it was over.
“William didn’t want to embarrass him,” Redondo recalled.
Camacho didn’t know it, but he had just been replaced.
Morgan and Menoyo both heard the gunshots. They knew right away they had to bolt back to camp.
The two men had walked off in the early morning to talk about Morgan’s emerging role in the Second Front, but now they had to turn around. Grabbing their rifles, they took off down the trail, the gunfire cracking louder as they neared Charco Azul.
In the distance, they saw that dozens of soldiers had sprinted toward the thicket of trees where the rebels had set up camp. The rebels were firing from behind the trees, but at least a hundred soldiers were lining up around them. Two trucks circled the perimeter with .30- and .50-caliber machine guns tied to the rooftops. The rebels were trapped.
Instead of stopping to size up the situation, Menoyo and Morgan rushed toward an opening, firing rapidly into the line of soldiers. With a British Sten submachine gun, Morgan sprayed the path in front of him as he bolted toward the camp. For a moment, neither man was sure that the other was going to make it, but within seconds, they broke through the perimeter.
The rebels saw the two men moving toward them, firing at the soldiers from behind trees. By the time Menoyo reached his men, they were pinned down. They awaited his orders. But Menoyo didn’t know how many soldiers had surrounded them. Worse, Batista’s men had brought mortars. From the size of the units forming around the camp, the rebels figured they were fighting an entire battalion.
“The army locked us in,” Redondo recalled.
The rebels had acquired new weapons and ammunition since arriving at Guanayara, so they could hold out for a while, but the mortar explosives were falling down on them. The enemy lines were closing in from every side.
In all of their encounters, the Second Front had never been in this kind of danger. This was payback for Finca Diana. More troubling was how the army knew the rebels’ exact position. The attack was too calculated, too coordinated. Most of the farmers and townspeople supported the revolución or at least stayed neutral, but some civilians may not have liked the guerrillas for one reason or another. Menoyo and the other leaders had warned the rebels about treating the locals with respect, but ultimately the Second Front was treading on their land.
Some of the rebels found shelter behind a large stone wall at the camp and set up a firing position. The soldiers came ready and loaded. They could sustain a continuous assault on the rebels until they wiped them out. There was no way that Menoyo and the men pinned down in the camp could simply fight their way out of it.
But they had two wildcards: Artola and Carreras. It had just dawned on Menoyo that neither man was around. They had left in the morning on separate reconnaissance patrols. Artola had fifteen men with him, and Carreras more than a dozen. They’d come back, and when they did, they were both smart enough to figure out what had happened and jump in. As long as Menoyo and the others could keep moving within the camp, they could buy more time.
Carreras had heard the gunfire and turned around, but he stopped short when he saw the soldiers forming their lines. Instead of attacking from ground level, Carreras and his men took to the high ground—a ledge above the camp—and set up their position there. After everyone was in place, Carreras took out his binoculars to scope out the enemy line. Then he gave the order.
At the same time, Artola and his men were approaching the camp from the opposite side. An experienced fighter, Artola noticed that the army was attacking from a traditional position, infantry in front and commanders in back. He and his men quickly took their place two hundred yards behind the officers’ position. With everyone ready, Artola ordered his men to open up.
With Carreras firing from the high ground and Artola and his men shooting from the rear, the soldiers were totally confused. They were supposed to be fighting only a few dozen guerrillas, not a whole battalion.
Menoyo saw his chance to escape. He ordered his men to gather around him. This was it. If they were going to die, they would do so singing the Cuban national anthem and charging the lines. He raised his hand and pointed forward. The rebels followed, firing their rifles.
There was just one problem. Morgan couldn’t parse the Spanish and didn’t understand the order. He and several others stayed back and continued firing. Likewise, a smaller unit of government soldiers remained and returned fire. As he had done before, Morgan stood in place, gripping his Sten, shooting from a standing position.
One of the army officers decided that he, too, was going to fight back from a standing position. Soon, the two men—Morgan and Lt. Antonio Regueira Luaces—were making a stand like cowboys in a Wild West gunfight, each refusing to give in.
Morgan wanted “to slug it out with him,” Redondo recalled.
Both men took turns diving for cover and then standing to return fire. Neither one was going to back down.
In the distance, Menoyo and the other rebels watched as the Yanqui continued to fire, stubbornly refusing to run. After several more minutes, Menoyo finally ordered the other rebels to fire at the Batista lieutenant to break up the showdown. Most of the other soldiers had already long since retreated to the hills.
In the end, five rebels died, compared to thirty government soldiers. Neither side could claim a clear victory, but the rebels had escaped certain annihilation. Batista’s army had dispatched five hundred men to avenge the loss at Finca Diana, and they had nothing to show for it.
On that day, April 3, 1958, the New York Times published a story about the emergence of a new rebel unit in Cuba: the Segundo Frente. Reporter Herbert Matthews chronicled the unit’s brief history and its emerging role in the revolution, but he also included something else: Morgan’s letter about why he was fighting in Cuba. Camp messengers had delivered the note to rebel supporters, who then put it into the reporter’s hands. Now the outside world knew of the Second Front and William Morgan.