Menoyo stared across the valley, looking for signs of the soldiers—a glint of light, a shimmer of smoke. The army was coming, that much he knew. But if the rebels could track their movements, they had the advantage.
Batista already had sent some two thousand soldiers to the Escambray, the most he had ever sent to the central mountains. If the ungrateful farmers wanted his firepower, they were going to get it. He also planned to send the B-26s to bomb key positions.
Menoyo knew the worst was yet to come, but he was far better prepared to deal with the confrontations. His unit was growing and finally trained in the basics. He was especially pleased with Morgan. He had become popular among the young barbudos, many of whom had asked to serve in his small unit.
One night, Camacho came over to Morgan, and the two began talking. The other rebels watched as the two huddled over an old Winchester, piecing together the parts to put it back together. They had patched up their differences.
By the morning, the two had devised a homemade assault rifle. Using the frame of a 1907 Winchester and combining it with other parts, they created a base so the gun could fire with interchangeable barrels, depending on what ammo was available. They called it the Cuban Winchester.
Morgan’s progress wasn’t lost on the other Second Front comandantes, including Carreras, Fleites, and Artola. After meeting in a circle at the end of a long July day, they called Morgan over to them. They had all agreed: It was time for Morgan to lead his own column. He was being promoted to comandante, the highest rank accorded a rebel in Cuba.
Morgan had been running smaller patrols, but Menoyo wanted his guerrilla trainer to lead now. For Morgan, it was bittersweet. He was elated over the confidence that Menoyo and others expressed in him, but no one from his family knew—not his mother, not his father, not his children. Amado and some of the others approached Morgan to congratulate him, but he downplayed the moment. Every one of the men was important to the unit, he said. If there was any consolation, it was that he had proved his detractors in the US Army wrong. He was a good soldier.
Menoyo wanted to launch patrols in the new area, but even before they could gather supplies, a runner rushed to camp with bad news: The Rural Guard had just looted Escandel. Some of the villagers might have been beaten.
Menoyo called his comandantes over. This was serious, he said. The people in the village were dirt poor, but they had still scraped together food and supplies to send to the Second Front camp a day earlier. Perhaps the Rural Guard had found out.
“We have to get over there,” Menoyo told his men.
Menoyo and Morgan led their teams together—over wire fences and steep slopes—along the long, winding trail that led to the hamlet.
Menoyo peered through his binoculars. “There,” he said.
The runner had reported looting, but this was worse. Some of the huts were smoldering in burned heaps. Thick, black smoke still hung in the air. They spotted the body of an old man sprawled by the side of the road and a villager hunched over him. Another villager ran up to Menoyo, shaking and crying. The Rural Guard had discovered that the hamlet had been supporting the rebels.
Hours earlier, the guards—some of them drunk—had burst into the structures, overturning tables and chairs. They grabbed a seventy-two-year-old man doddering with mental illness and demanded to know the whereabouts of the guerrillas. Dumbfounded, the old man had no idea what they were asking.
A tall sergeant struck the man in the face and ordered him to tell them. The soldiers forced the old man into a chair, the sergeant waving a knife in front of him. Still, the old man didn’t know what to say. The sergeant then reached over, pulled on the man’s lips, and in one motion came down with his knife and severed them from his face. Blood spurted on the man’s clothes and the floor as he screamed. But the soldiers weren’t finished.
The sergeant pulled the old man from the shanty—while the villagers pleaded for him to stop—and fastened a rope around his neck. Pulling the rope like a leash, he yanked the man to the back of a truck and tied the rope around the rear bumper. One of the guards jumped behind the wheel and, revving the engine, sped away.
To the wild delight of the guards, the truck dragged the old man over the dirt road, his feet and arms flailing in the dirt.
By now, the whole hamlet had come out, all of them screaming at the guards to stop. A woman ran to where her grandchild was hiding. She fell to the ground as one of Batista’s men fired a round of bullets into her. Then the sergeant gave the order for his men to torch the huts. One by one, the guardsmen lit the walls and thatched roofs.
Morgan’s face flushed with anger, his fists clenched. He had never seen anything like this. He had known for a long time why the Cuban people had rebelled against Batista. But he hadn’t witnessed the depths of the brutality until now.
Morgan had fought in battles. He had killed. But this was different. These were innocents. The Rural Guard had targeted and extracted a gruesome vengeance on farmers caught in the middle of a revolution over which they had no meaningful control. Morgan could barely look at the old man on the ground, his face contorted and mutilated. Only an animal could do something like that to a defenseless person. There was going to be hell to pay.
The remaining villagers told the rebels where the guardsmen were heading. The guerillas came up with a plan: They would shadow the soldiers and wait for the right moment to attack. But instead of traveling on the road behind them, the rebels took a side route.
Through his binoculars, Menoyo could see men in army fatigues moving along the road, making sure they were heading in the right direction. For the next hour, he and the others jogged along a deer trail on the edge of a huge ravine. Most of the men were tired, but wouldn’t have stopped for anything.
As the sun was setting, Menoyo came up on a ledge and looked down. The soldiers had stopped and looked to be setting up camp in a row of houses. If they could surround the army camp from above, they could launch a surprise attack.
“We hit them tonight,” he told the others.
Menoyo split his thirty men into groups to surround the houses. Morgan took a dozen rebels and waited in the rear to repel any escapes. The trap was set.
As they waited, Menoyo said it appeared there were more soldiers than just the ones who had ransacked the village. There was a chance they were packing more serious firepower: mortars, grenade launchers. If they could stun the soldiers with the first shots—even just to scare them—Batista’s men wouldn’t have time to set up any artillery. Hopefully, the enemy wouldn’t be able to discern the size of the rebel force.
Menoyo gave the order. The rebels opened fire on the houses where the soldiers had camped. As expected, the troops panicked and ran from the buildings. The rebels fired relentlessly into the scrambling guardsmen, watching as their bodies fell to the ground. Within minutes, dozens lay in the mud, dead or badly wounded. Others crawled or ran from the camp and bolted down the road.
Morgan, waiting in the bush, gave the second order to fire. Rebel rifles cracked along the roadway, but it was too dark to tell if they were hitting anyone. Morgan and his men ran toward the soldiers, but they did so at their own peril. They could be running into an ambush.
The rebels stopped. It was time to head back and join Menoyo and his men. In the morning light, they could see better and stood a better chance of finding the soldiers. As they walked back to the camp, they learned from some of the other rebels that the big, hulking sergeant—the worst of the culprits—wasn’t among the dead. Morgan had wanted to find him. For now he had to wait.
Shortly after rising the next morning, Morgan and his men spotted Batista’s soldiers walking along the road to Camagüey, some of them carrying wounded comrades. Morgan ordered his men to hurry to the pass before the Rural Guardsmen set up an ambush on both sides of the road.
Just as the soldiers appeared, Morgan raised his hand. “Tres, dos, uno,” he counted, just loud enough for his men to hear. The rebels opened fire on the stunned soldiers. Some fell to the ground, while others tried to run. The leaders in front didn’t know what to do. Most of the enemy guardsmen had nowhere to go. They threw up their arms. They were surrendering.
Morgan lowered his gun and ordered his men to stop.
The rebels walked forward, slowly, carefully scrutinizing each of their captives. There he was: the sergeant. “We have him,” Morgan said. Without hesitating, the rebels pushed the man away from the other captives. And then, without waiting for orders, they sprayed his body with bullets, even after he had fallen to the ground, a bloody pulp of flesh and bones.