Darkness had enveloped La Cabaña, the ancient prison fortress near Havana Bay. Most of the inmates had been ordered to their bunks, and most of the death sentences had been carried out without a hitch. But the commanding officers instructed the guards to remain alert. The firing squad stood gathered at the craggy, bloodstained wall outside, waiting. No one from the chapel area—God’s waiting room—would see morning.
William Alexander Morgan, his thick arms bound by handcuffs, walked down the long, dark hall, past the cells of inmates huddled in their own filth. At his side, the priest hurried to keep up. They passed the chapel where Morgan had knelt in darkness the night before and whispered his prayers. At the guard station, uniformed men gathered to watch the prisoner and the priest. The guards would make sure that Morgan didn’t see dawn. They had swung open the exit door. There, his escorts were waiting to whisk him away.
The stone-walled hallway narrowed between the chapel and the center of the prison and then opened to the inner courtyard and the dark sky. As they passed the next station, Morgan and the priest were met by more guards eyeballing them. Rarely had a prisoner captured so much attention in Fidel Castro’s prison, where more than 597 men had been hauled to their deaths since the revolution ended two years before. But rarely had the prison housed anyone like Morgan. Even the guards stepped back as the muscular, six-foot-tall prisoner walked by, oblivious to those around him.
He was the Yanqui comandante.
Two years earlier, he had been a hero of the revolution. He had won the hearts of millions of Cubans by helping to liberate them from a brutal dictator. Not since Theodore Roosevelt charged up San Juan Hill had an American captured the imagination of the country like this. He had come to Cuba for adventure, but he wound up leading a ragtag band of rebels to a series of stunning victories that forced military dictator Fulgencio Batista y Zaldívar from power.
Morgan’s image—wild beard, blond hair, powerful build—splashed across magazines and newspapers, joining Castro and Che Guevara as icons of a revolution celebrated around the world.
Young boys kept trading cards of him, women begged for his autograph, movie producers tried to track him down, and writers wanted to tell his life story. In America, he verged on celebrity. But William Morgan was more than a celebrity.
No one—not the guards, not the priest, not the prisoners who bunked with him in the hot, cramped dorm known as Gallery 13—knew how much lay at stake beyond these eighteenth-century prison walls. Castro was forging alliances with the Soviet Union, and America was about to lead a secret invasion to oust him from power. The plan was in place, the strike just five weeks away. While US-backed forces landed on the southern coast, Morgan and others would lead an insurrection in the central mountains.
Morgan already had stashed hundreds of rifles, hand grenades, and machine guns in safe houses. Soon he would hand them out to a small army of rebels who had been hiding in the mountains for months. During those months, he had been drilling them: push-ups, sit-ups, jumping jacks, target practice. The plan was risky—treacherous to some of the planners—but with Morgan and other rebel leaders in the Escambray mountains to fight Castro’s forces, it stood a chance. If the plan succeeded, it would remove the threat of a Communist nation just ninety miles from America’s shores.
The Kennedy White House had been monitoring Morgan’s trial. So had J. Edgar Hoover, whose FBI agents had been tracking the Americano’s movements inside La Cabaña. The CIA had sent its own agents to Havana to keep watch.
At the end of the hall, the door slammed behind him and the priest. If the rebel forces could spring him, if Tony Chao and the others could reach La Cabaña in time . . .
In the distance glittered the lights of Havana, a city on the brink.
Olga Morgan leaned down, pulled her two little girls close, and held them tightly. This was going to be difficult. It could be days—weeks, even—before she would see them again. But she had to get out.
She gazed for a moment at Loretta and Olguita and then walked past the fountain and sweeping arches of the embassy to the car. The driver had popped the trunk. Without hesitating, she raised one leg over the side, then the other, rolling onto the floor of the trunk. As planned, she turned on her side, curled into a ball, and nodded. The door slammed shut.
Darkness.
She could hear the driver’s door close. The engine started. Prisa, por favor.
Hurry.
The messenger had just left the embassy and told her that she needed to leave. Morgan was going to escape. She needed to reach the safe house in Camagüey, where he would meet her. There wasn’t much time. If everything went as planned, her husband would be free and on his way to the mountains. The Brazilian ambassador had warned her not to leave the embassy. She could be arrested, beaten, or worse by the G2, Castro’s secret police.
But Morgan had always come through for her. He would come through again. No one could separate them.
She had wanted him to leave after the revolution so they could raise their two daughters in peace, even if that meant moving to America. But he wouldn’t do it.
“I can’t leave my boys,” he said of the men who served with him in the revolution. Thousands of rebels were waiting in the Escambray, poised for another upheaval, this one more brutal than the last.
Her heart pounded as the car sped through the streets, turning corners, bouncing her back and forth.
The last time she saw him, she held his hand in the prison waiting room.
“I love you,” he had said.
If she could survive for fifty more miles, she’d see him again. She had mustered the strength before, and she would do it again.