Clemente Balladares Castillo

William Alexander Morgan (1928-1961), an American from Ohio who joined the Cuban Revolution and rose to the rank of comandante. Morgan proved an effective and fearless fighter, training rebels in explosives and leading assaults that drove Batista's forces from key mountain positions. He played a major role in the overthrow of Batista, entering Havana as a celebrated hero. Around this time, he was stripped of his U.S. citizenship by Washington and was later granted Cuban citizenship. In 1959, Morgan acted as a double agent for Fidel Castro, luring and capturing an anti-Castro invasion force backed by Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo and mob elements. As Fidel Castro pivoted the revolution toward Marxism-Leninism and aligned with the Soviet Union, the staunchly anti-communist Morgan became disillusioned. Morgan turned against the regime, using a state-funded bullfrog hatchery business as a covert front to stockpile weapons and support a CIA-backed anti-Castro rebellion in the Escambray Mountains. In late 1960 and early 1961, Morgan was arrested and executed by Castro's government... In the damp chill past midnight on March 11, 1961, the limestone walls of Havana’s La Cabaña fortress were illuminated by the harsh glare of military truck headlamps. Standing in the fortress moat before a blood-pocked execution wall was thirty-two-year-old William Alexander Morgan. Broad-shouldered, bearded, and dressed in a rumpled khaki prisoner's uniform, the native of Cleveland, Ohio, faced a firing squad of men who had once followed him into battle. Standing on an overlooking parapet in the shadows, smoking a cigar, was Comandante Ernesto "Che" Guevara. Just two years earlier, Morgan had ridden into Havana as a celebrated liberator of Cuba, one of only two foreigners ever awarded the supreme revolutionary rank of *Comandante*. Now, the American who had helped topple a dictator was about to die at the hands of the regime he fought to crown. Morgan had lived the restless life of an American drifter: a high school dropout, a court-martialed US Army paratrooper in postwar Japan, and a merchant seaman. But when he slipped into Cuba's rugged Escambray Mountains in late 1957, he found his calling. Joining the *Segundo Frente Nacional del Escambray* (Second National Front of the Escambray), Morgan proved to be a ferocious guerrilla tactician. Leading peasant columns through dense jungle, raiding Batista garrisons, and personally leading assaults under heavy machine-gun fire, he earned the fierce devotion of his men and the admiration of the Cuban public. When Fulgencio Batista fled into exile on New Year's Day 1959, Morgan marched into Cienfuegos at the head of a victorious rebel army. His loyalty to the new Cuba was tested almost immediately. In August 1959, Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo launched a well-funded international conspiracy to overthrow Castro, offering Morgan a million dollars to lead a military mutiny. Morgan reported the plot directly to Fidel. Playing the role of a greedy mercenary double agent, Morgan lured Trujillo's arms-laden transport planes and conspirators into an ambush at Trinidad's airfield. Fidel Castro appeared live on national television, wrapping his arms around the American soldier, hailing him as a true patriot and a champion of the free Cuban people. The romance died as the revolution pivoted eastward. Morgan was a fierce believer in democratic constitutionalism who had taken up arms to restore Cuba’s 1940 constitution, not to build a Marxist state. As Che Guevara and Raúl Castro purged moderates, invited Soviet military advisers to Havana, and suppressed independent press, Morgan openly expressed his disgust. "I came to Cuba to fight for freedom," he told confidants, "not to trade one tyrant for another." #archaeohistories