Cuba says it cannot find body of American who joined revolution

By TRACEY EATON / The Dallas Morning News

HAVANA – An Ohio woman's quest to have her husband's remains returned to the United States from Cuba has hit an unexpected snag: Cemetery workers can't find
the body.

Olga Goodwin, 65, said she's not giving up and won't rest until the corpse of William Morgan, the so-called "Yankee Commander," is back on American soil.

Mr. Morgan shocked his family when he left Ohio in 1957 and joined the Cuban revolution. But he later plotted against Fidel Castro and was executed in 1961.

Even today, memories of the blue-eyed American endure in South Florida, where Cuban exiles remember him as a brave and skillful soldier. But the story is quite
different in Cuba, where Castro loyalists regard Mr. Morgan as a mercenary driven by money and the CIA.

To be sure, William Alexander Morgan was a controversial figure, and his legacy is shrouded by Cold-War politics and passion over Cuba.

Like John Walker, the "American Taliban" accused of conspiring to kill U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan, Mr. Morgan journeyed to a foreign land to fight someone else's war.
He came from an upper-middle-class family. He was idealistic, daring and young – just 30 years old.

But the parallels end there, his supporters say.

"For good or bad, William was fighting for a just cause – democracy. But I don't find anything noble in what John Walker was doing," said Luly del Pino, whose father,
Jesús Carrera, was also executed in Cuba.

The latest chapter in the Morgan saga began to unfold on March 3 when the Toledo Blade newspaper reported that Ms. Goodwin wanted her late husband's remains
returned.

Cuban officials say they can't say much about the case since they haven't received an official request for the body.

Ms. Goodwin concedes she hasn't submitted one. She said she spent 12 years in Cuban prisons and can't bring herself to deal with the socialist government. She wants
help.

And she'll likely get it because her plight is gaining steam in Florida's exile community, where even some of Mr. Morgan's former foes wouldn't mind seeing his body
returned.

Ability to forgive

Take Roberto Martín Perez, for instance. Mr. Morgan put a gun to his head in August 1959 after Mr. Martin and others were captured in Cuba trying to topple the
Castro government.

Mr. Martin spent three decades in prison on the island.

Even so, "he doesn't resent what William Morgan did. Like a lot of former prisoners, he has a great ability to forgive," said his wife, Ninoska Perez, a radio talk show host
in Miami.

Mr. Morgan "was just one more victim of Fidel Castro. He was used," she said.

Said Ms. Goodwin: "He was a worthy man. His ideals were pure."

The widow would like to see her late husband's American citizenship restored – it was stripped after he joined the rebels. But during a telephone interview, she declined
to say how she planned to go about it.

William Morgan grew up in Ohio. He was a restless teenager who dropped out of high school and was arrested for grand larceny three times, according to the Blade.
He spent time in the circus, became a soldier, went AWOL and served jail time before making his way to Cuba.

At first, Mr. Morgan was evidently running guns to the island, the newspaper said, but soon he was caught up in the fight to topple dictator Fulgencio Batista.

He joined a unit known as the Second Front of Escambray and was promoted to major, the highest rank for non-Cubans. He's "the kind of American that Cuba needs,"
Mr. Castro said then.

The Yankee Commander, as he came to be called, fought against government soldiers in the Escambray mountains southeast of Havana. He met his future wife, Olga,
at a rebel camp.

"We were fighting against a dictatorship," she said. "We didn't know what socialism was."

Working with the CIA

Some fighters did know about socialism and didn't want it.

"NO COMMUNISTS ALLOWED," read a sign at the entrance to one Escambray camp, according to Fabián Escalante, former head of Cuban State Security.

In his 1993 book, The Secret War – CIA Covert Operations Against Cuba , Mr. Escalante says Mr. Castro's enemies tried to use the Escambray front to undermine
the revolution. And he alleges that Mr. Morgan was cooperating with the CIA even before 1959 in hopes of preventing Castro loyalists from taking power.

He paints this picture:

In March 1959, Mr. Morgan allegedly met with anti-Castro conspirators and said that for a million dollars he could whip the Second Front into shape and "bounce Castro
from power."

Mr. Morgan soon began receiving payments of $10,000 each, the book says. He also expected to get help from Rafael Trujillo, a Dominican dictator who reportedly
resented Mr. Castro and wanted to invade Cuba with foreign forces.

But Mr. Morgan soon worried that Mr. Castro had discovered the plot, and so he told him about it.

Mr. Castro did know about the plan, and when planes and forces from the Dominican Republic began to land in August 1959, they were quickly captured.

Ms. Goodwin won't say what Mr. Morgan's intentions were, but says, "People say a lot of trash about William. He was never a mercenary. Where's the money?"

Cuban authorities arrested Mr. Morgan in the fall of 1960 and accused him of stockpiling arms and plotting to overthrow Mr. Castro.

Ms. Goodwin, also convicted, hid out in the mountains until she was caught and sent to prison for 12 years. The government let her leave as part of the Mariel boatlift,
when 125,000 Cubans fled the island in 1980.

Letters from long ago

Now, all these years later, Ms. Goodwin cherishes letters her husband sent to her before his death.

Read one letter:

"To tell you that I love you is not sufficient because words could never express my feelings toward you or what you mean to me."

As for the two daughters he had with Ms. Goodwin, Mr. Morgan wrote, "Let them know someday who their father was and what my beliefs and ideals were."

He was convicted and sentenced to death in 1961.

The American, as Morgan lore goes, marched to his trial singing, "As the Caissons Go Rolling Along."

Before the firing squad, he asked that his handcuffs be removed. Then, according to the Blade, he embraced a sergeant and said, "Tell the boys that I forgive them."

It was a cruel death, according to the 1969 book The Losers.

"Kneel and beg for your life!" someone shouted from the darkness.

"I kneel for no man!" he yelled back.

Then, as the story goes, he was shot in the knees and fell to the ground before a captain "emptied a clip from his Tommy gun into his chest."

With all its twists and turns, Mr. Morgan's story has captured the imagination of such writers as Alex Abella, author of The Great American, a 1997 fictionalized
account of the adventurer's life.

Ms. Goodwin, who has remarried and now lives in Toledo, said she only wants her husband's remains back. Only then, she said, will she feel at peace.

"I don't hate. I don't have grudges. The past is the past," she said. "But it's always present."

Her husband was first buried in a marble crypt at Havana's Colón Cemetery. His remains were moved in 1971 to make way for more bodies in the crypt.

Cemetery workers said they were convinced they knew the location of Mr. Morgan's corpse, but when they opened it to look inside, there were 14 boxes containing the
remains of other people. No William Morgan.

They said they could not locate the body.

"It's a lie," maintains Ms. Goodwin, who says that workers are hiding the location of her husband's body out of spite.

Even if the corpse is found, however, there's no guarantee that the Cuba will return it. Still, Ms. Goodwin is hopeful. "I'm fighting for a cause," she said.