The revolution had since fractured, its leaders devouring their own, like Saturn, but the sight of Morgan before a firing squad was a shock. It was March 11, 1961, two years after Morgan had helped to overthrow the dictator Fulgencio Batista, bringing Castro to power. Though he was now shaved and wearing prison garb, the executioners recognized him as the mysterious Americano who once had been hailed as a hero of the revolution. The most alluring images-taken when he was fighting in the mountains, with Fidel Castro and Che Guevara-showed Morgan, with an untamed beard, holding a Thompson submachine gun. With a stark jaw, a pugnacious nose, and scruffy blond hair, he had the gallant look of an adventurer in a movie serial, of a throwback to an earlier age, and photographs of him had appeared in newspapers and magazines around the world. Morgan was nearly six feet tall, and had the powerful arms and legs of someone who had survived in the wild. The gunmen gazed at the man they had been ordered to kill. Morgan, who was thirty-two, blinked into the lights. Flecks of blood were drying on the patch of ground where Morgan’s friend had been shot, moments earlier. He was standing, with his back against a bullet-pocked wall, in an empty moat surrounding La Cabaña-an eighteenth-century stone fortress, on a cliff overlooking Havana Harbor, that had been converted into a prison. Then a burst of floodlights illuminated him: William Alexander Morgan, the great Yankee comandante. It was as if he were invisible, as he had been before coming to Cuba, in the midst of revolution. For a moment, he was obscured by the Havana night.
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