UNITED STATES—Under questioning, Morgan said he last saw Evans at a government office Saturday morning, the day of the explosion. He said his wife Olga María told him Evans returned to the Morgan home in Vedado district before noon, stayed until after the explosion and left shortly after for the airport. Evans left a note saying he was going home “to sell his horses and cows and would return to Cuba in a week.”
Actually there were two explosions, at 3:10 in the afternoon the ship exploded. Half an hour later, when hundreds of people were in a rescue operation organized by the Cuban army, the second blast occurred and it was deadlier by far. When the explosion was first heard, Che Guevara drove to the harbor. He was a medical doctor and spent hours ministering those injured in the armed forces and dock workers. It got him out of that boring Agrarian Reform meeting.
Morgan said he himself did not go to the dock area until after the explosion of the French freighter, Le Coubre, as a payload of 76 tons of munitions were being unloaded.
Fidel Castro blamed the sabotage in the Havana Harbor on the United States. The United States denied any involvement in the plot. A secretary in the State Department, a certain Wieland, spoke in the strongest terms in a memorandum describing the shock felt by the Government and people of the United States when the Prime Minister expressed his belief that the United States was responsible for the explosion.
Still referring to the memorandum, the Secretary described the tenor of Prime Minister Castro’s remarks as extremely provocative and apparently calculated to transform the understandable sorrow of the Cuban people into resentment against the United States. He said the United States Government vigorously rejects and protests this unfounded and irresponsible attitude by Prime Minister Castro and considers that his baseless, erroneous and misleading statements on this occasion can only contribute further to the unhappy deterioration which has occurred in relations between our two countries over the past year.
Less than a year later, in 1962, before Congress Senator Tower from Texas would declare: Here is a man, a State Department official who has been denounced by four former U.S. Ambassadors in public testimony, as untrustworthy, incompetent, a supporter of leftist elements in Latin America, and as instrumental in the fall of Cuba to communism.
“Lee appeared to be a nice boy and he made a good impression,” said Morgan, who was cherry-picked by the Company to lead the mission. “But he’s off his rocker somewhere in saying I was in on this with him.”
Jack Lee Evans vanishes from our tale—if anybody was CIA, Evans was. Of course we’re in Bananaland where the truth is gobbled as by the ravenous jungle, the smoke of innuendo envelops all.
Morgan faced a firing squad just a few days later, March 11. He refused to be blindfolded or bound and then he crumpled over as the Castro brothers and other dignitaries watched. Bill Morgan was 32 years old, just a fortnight shy of the biblical 33. His wife, now widow, Olga Maria was tried in absentia. She served 10 years of a 30-year sentence for being a co-conspirator, after which she headed for Ohio. Toledo. She confided in a series of stores that appeared in the Toledo Blade.
There Olga María Rodriguez Farinas confided that she and her husband had started running guns to anti-Castro guerillas. Further, she asked that her husband’s remains be reinterred in Cleveland, where he grew up in an affluent Toledo suburb, West End. Fidel Castro, still in power gave permission for to visiting U.S. congressmen for his remains to be taken from the opulent necropolis of el Cementerio de Cristobal Colón and buried in Ohio in the palindromic year of 2002.
Maybe he found his redemption, after leaving behind four widows and three children, a son with a German-Japanese wife, two daughters with Olga María. When it came to his ethos, it was his son he spoke of In a message sent to the Gotham Times, after he joined the Cuban revolution:
I am here because I believe that the most important thing for free men to do is to protect the freedom of others. I am here so that my son, when he is grown, will not have to fight or die in a land not his own, because one man or group of men try to take his liberty from him. I am here because I believe that free men should take up arms and stand together and fight and destroy the groups and forces that want to take the rights of people away.
To be continued…
