The guards locked the gates for the night. The entire prison was on edge. Jailers were prowling the halls outside, making sure the inmates were jammed inside the galerías. Bunks were pushed against the walls, leaving most of the men to compete for space on the floors. The sheer number of prisoners was making the fortress vulnerable. There were only so many guards. If enough men rushed the exits, most would more than likely get out.
In the darkness, Morgan heard the inmates breathing in their sleep and the sounds of the guards passing by the galería. Then came a crackling sound echoing down the long cavernous hall. At first, it startled some of the prisoners. It was way too late in the night for the dreaded voice. But they all knew what it meant. It was the roll call for prisoners being called to trial. No one wanted to hear their name, but they all listened intently.
They knew the drill: The guards would show up to grab the condemned and take them to the special cells below. There, they would wait until the next day to appear before the court.
The footsteps of the jailers were getting closer as Hiram Gonzalez brushed the sleep from his eyes and looked over at the nearby bunk. Nearly every man was sitting up to watch as the guards came into the room.
Morgan was already waiting as they marched down the aisle. The lights came on as the other inmates sat dazed, watching. This couldn’t be, they said to each other. No one expected his name to be called. But it was.
William Alexander Morgan. The Yanqui comandante was being called to trial.
Loretta Morgan couldn’t finish the conversation on the phone. Crying, she had been trying to reach Thomas “Lud” Ashley, the congressman from Toledo, but he had been steeped in House sessions on the Hill.
She had been trying to contact the Kennedy White House, sending a telegram on March 9. She reached out to Cardinal Richard Cushing, one of the most prominent American Catholic clerics. She even tried Cuban President Osvaldo Dorticós Torrado. Since the United States no longer had diplomatic relations with Cuba, the White House had reached out to the Swiss embassy.
This was the nightmare she had been pushing back, hoping it would never come. She had warned Bill. She had begged him to get out of Cuba, bring Olga, and come to the United States. She didn’t care what kind of trouble he was in with the FBI. Anything was better than being there.
For the past several days, she had been haunted by the image of La Cabaña. As a young woman, she and her husband had vacationed in Havana, and she remembered seeing the stone fortress looming over the harbor. “That awful prison,” she later recalled. “I never thought I would ever have a son there.”
She had reached out to members of the church altar society, asking for prayers. If she could travel to Cuba herself and plead with Castro for Bill’s life, she would have done that, too.
Ashley had already contacted the State Department about getting Morgan a lawyer. Unfortunately, Morgan wasn’t a US citizen anymore, so there was nothing the department could do. “An informal approach to the Cuban government no longer existed,” wrote Ashley in a letter.
There was only once place for Loretta to venture: the large, looming cathedral at the end of her block. There, she slipped into a pew, clasped her hands, and prayed.
Morgan yanked on his bootstraps to make sure they were tight and then tucked in his shirt. At the far end of the prison, the judges were waiting. After hours of leaning over a table and jotting down notes, he was ready.
In a letter he wrote to his mother earlier in the day, he said all men have “a right to freedom” and that he had a responsibility to finish what he started.
With the footsteps of the guards echoing down the hall, Morgan stood up by the door. In just two more minutes, he’d be facing his accusers. As he rounded the corner of the chapel and headed to the hearing room, the prisoners came to the front of their cells and the guards stood from their stations to catch a glimpse of the Americano. As he walked by, he did something no one could quite understand. It started with a low hum and soon grew into a melody that caught the attention of everyone around him. Morgan began singing, “The Army Song.”
No one knew why he was reciting the lyrics of a tune he had learned when he was eighteen years old and in boot camp, but now he was singing it before captors who held the power to decide whether he could live or die. He bellowed while heading toward the door:
Till our final ride,
it will always be our pride
to keep those caissons a rolling along
The room was packed with scores of spectators, including United Press International reporter Henry Raymont, one of the most prominent correspondents in Cuba. Off to the side, Olga’s mother and sister held back tears as the guards escorted Morgan across the room.
Most of the hearings were cut-and-dried, with only family members in the audience, but this was already building as a spectacle. American broadcaster Lee Hall was in the audience. Luis Carro, the government defense lawyer, plopped down in a seat next to Morgan and the others, while district attorney Fernando Ibarra Luis Florez was already strutting in front of the five judges.
Ibarra had earned a reputation as an icy-cold prosecutor who regularly sent men to the wall. As far as he was concerned, they could line up Morgan and the others now or later. It didn’t matter. They were traitors who deserved death.
Carro’s job was to keep the men alive, but it was getting harder. With only minutes to meet with each man, he couldn’t possibly mount adequate defenses. Known as the attorney for the damned, he had been swamped for weeks with men begging him for help, sometimes shaking and crying in their cells. As he looked at Morgan across the table, he felt he already knew him. The Yanqui comandante’s face had been splashed in newspapers for the past two years as one of the heroes of the revolution.
But Carro was up against a juggernaut. Morgan and Carreras, both comandantes, were accused of not just moving arms, but leading a group plotting to overthrow the government. The others—like Ossorio, Amado, and even Olga (being tried in absentia)—were all participants in the plan.
Carro asked the military tribunal for a few minutes before starting the trial. Talking to Morgan and Carreras, Carro made it clear the government had a strong case against the men for hauling weapons to the Escambray. Secret police had already found the caches. They had a better chance of punching holes in the government’s case that they were plotting to overthrow Castro.
On the other side, Ibarra was confident he had enough evidence to bury them. The prosecutor stood before the five judges and read the charges, his voice rising in anger. Morgan and Carreras used their positions of trust to betray Cuba and deserved nothing less than death. The weapons they moved to the Escambray—the .50-caliber machine guns, M1s, hand grenades, and antitank rockets—ended up in the hands of guerrillas who were actively fighting Cuban soldiers.
To prove his case, Ibarra called Mario Marin to the witness stand. A hush fell over the courtroom as Marin, one of Morgan’s drivers, stepped forward. Just before Olga was arrested, Marin fled to the mountains, where he was picked up by Castro’s men. Under questioning, he said he not only loaded guns onto the trucks bound for the Escambray but that he drove them, too.
Ibarra pulled out a detailed map seized from Morgan’s home with markings of strategic spots in the Escambray. There was no reason for Morgan to keep this map unless he was targeting these areas for future gun shipments.
Ibarra also called on the testimony of two other members of Morgan’s entourage, Rueben Dominguez and Manolo Castro Cisneros. Both backed Marin’s claims.
Listening quietly, Carro turned to Morgan. The Americano was already walking to the witness stand. A hush fell over the courtroom.
Carro opened up by asking Morgan about the guns. It was critical to deal with those charges first. Turning to the judges, Morgan said that whatever guns he moved to the mountains were only for his protection and that of the Second Front. They were a militia that fought bravely in the central mountains, and they had every right to stockpile weapons. The map the prosecutor was waving around was left over from when Morgan helped save the fledgling Castro government from the Trujillo invasion. They didn’t need directions to get to the guns that they themselves stored.
As far as Marin and the other witnesses, Morgan said they were “personal enemies” whom the government sent to spy on him. Their sole purpose in testifying against Morgan was to curry favor with the government.
Morgan had just a couple of minutes to make his case. To Morgan, this wasn’t about running guns or unseating Castro. As far as he was concerned, the charges were a sham. This fight was about protecting the principles of the revolution—a revolution they all believed in. Morgan made it clear that none of the defendants in the courtroom had betrayed the cause. The revolution was bigger than all of them.
He looked at Ossorio, Amado, Carreras, and the others and turned to the court. No one did anything to hurt the people of Cuba. They were all still fighting a revolution in which they believed. “I stand here innocent, and I guarantee this court that if I am found guilty I will walk to the execution wall with no escort, with moral strength and clear conscience. I have defended this revolution because I believed in it.”
The Yankee comandante had said everything he needed to say.
The judges—Jorge Robreño Marieges, Mario A. Tagle Babe, Roberto Pafradela Napoles, Pelayo Fernandez-Rubio, and Ramon Martinez Fernandez—turned to each other and began to whisper. It was time to decide the fate of the defendants. They had done this scores of times before and would do so scores of times again. Rarely, if ever, was there dissension.
After just a couple of minutes, the chief judge, Robreño, looked up to say they had reached a decision; it was unanimous. With the courtroom quiet, the judge slowly read the charges for each man. Everyone sat still, staring straight ahead.
“Guilty on all charges,” he said.
In the gallery, some of the spectators gasped. Olga’s mother and sister grabbed onto each another and began to cry. The judges rose from their seats, turned around, and walked back to their chambers.
The guards escorted the defendants from the hearing room. Down the hall, they were led into the solitary cells at the rear of the chapel, where they would await sentencing.
Morgan walked to the rear of his cell, but before the guards could slam his door shut, he asked for paper and a pencil. It might be the last time he would have a chance to write Olga. He wasn’t sure how she would get the letter, but he would make sure it was passed to his lawyer. As he leaned over a small table in the cell, he thought about the woman he had met in the Escambray what seemed like an eternity ago. Night was falling on the camp when she walked in, and everyone was tired. But he could never forget the moment.
“Since the first time I saw you in the mountains until the last time I saw you in prison, you have been my love, my happiness, my companion in life and in my thoughts during my moment of death,” he wrote. As he thought about their short life together, Morgan couldn’t help but mention the regrets of all the external events that came between them: the crowded homes, the emergencies that consumed him. “Such little time we had to spend together, you, the girls and myself, it always seems that we could never be alone, the moments that we were able to, we had to steal them.”
What bothered him now was that the Castro government was accusing him of hurting the revolution, but it was Castro who had abandoned the revolution. “Olga, I have never been a traitor or have done any damage to Cuba. I tell you this because you know this is the truth,” he wrote. “I ask you to please never allow that my name, the girls and yours get utilized for political reasons. For those who would use them for hatred, wrongs, or to attack Cuba or its people or to represent things which I could never represent.”
Morgan went on to caution Olga that he had thought long and hard about his accusers and pleaded with her to rise above her personal feelings. “I do not want blood spilled over my cause. Revenge is not the answer. It’s better that I die because I have defended lives. I only ask that someday the truth will be known and that my daughters will be proud of their father.”
After he finished the letter, the guards came to the door. The judges were waiting at the dais. The spectators had filed back into the courtroom. With guards on both sides, Morgan walked down the hallway and entered the room.
After waiting for the defendants to take their place, Morgan and Carreras were told to stand before the court. The chief judge looked up and without showing any emotion, he declared: death by firing squad.
Morgan stared at the judge without flinching. Carreras stood erect. From the rear, one of the prisoners stood up. “I, too, want to die,” said Ossorio. “If you’re going to shoot William Morgan, then shoot me.” Next to him, Edmundo Amado stood and said the same.
The spectators in the gallery stirred and murmured before the chief judge warned Ossorio and Amado to sit down. They were in no position to ask for anything. The sentences had been decided.