October 22, 1960.p. 1.
Ohioan’s Wife Also Jailed
By Herald
Wire Services
HAVANA – Expatriate
American Soldier of Fortune Maj. William Morgan was arrested Friday night
and held for immediate trial and a possible death sentence.
A government
spokesman said Morgan would be tried by a revolutionary tribunal for plotting
against the Castro government, Defense Minister Raul Castro had said “traitors
will be executed kneeling with their backs to the firing squad.”
Cuban firing
squads have executed three other Americans this month for Anti-Castro activities.
But unlike Morgan, the three, Anthony Zarba of Boston, Robert Fuller of
Miami, and Allen Thompson of Queen city, Tex., had never supported the
revolutionary government.
A Cuban military
court Friday sentenced American Pilot Leslie Bradley to 10 years’ imprisonment
on charges of participating in a plot against the Castro regime. Bradley
is a former resident of Minneapolis, Minn.
The same tribunal
handed down a 16-year prison term to Chester Lacayo, a Nicaraguan exile
accused of being the architect of the alleged plot.
They were accused
of faking a plot to invade Nicaragua from Cuba to embarrass the Castro
regime.
Morgan, of Toledo,
Ohio, was seized with another army officer, Maj. Jesus Carreras. Both were
accused of counter-revolutionary activities. Morgan was said to have been
involved with anti-Castro forces in the interior and to have hidden arms
and aided anti-government plotters to escape.
His last assignment
for the Fidel Castro regime was the development of a frog-breeding farm
outside of Havana.
Morgan served
with rebel forces during the two-year revolutionary campaign which led
to Fulgencio Batista’s overthrow in Jan. 1, 1959. He campaigned in the
Sierra de Escambray.
Meanwhile qualified
observers said Friday that Russian and Czech technicians are assembling
Soviet fighter aircraft at San Julian, a former U.S. Navy World War II
base. Some 200 more “technicians” will arrive from Moscow next year, Argentine-born
Ernesto (Che) Guevara, Cuban National Bank president, disclosed in a television
address in which he spoke of receiving help from “volunteers.”
(In Moscow, the
government radio predicted that “15,000 counter-revolutionaries, armed
with the latest American weapons and trained in the U.S.A.” will invade
Cuba soon. It said they would make simultaneous landings in several areas).
(In Washington,
the Navy disclosed that U.S. Marine forces at the big Guantanamo Naval
Base have been strengthened. The normal complement there is under 200 men
and a navy spokesman said the increase was “not large”).
Reports have circulated abroad that 3,000 Communist Czechoslovak troops are training to serve in Cuba.