UNITED STATES—The French steamship which blew up dockside in Havana harbor was sabotaged by a Cuban dockworker. A frightened Oklahoma cowboy, Jack Evans fled to Miami after the explosion. He was terrified his knowledge of the anti-Castro plot could catapult him into Cuban jail or before a firing squad. An unidentified Cuban dockworker, Evans said, carried a package containing six sticks of dynamite aboard the French freighter Le Coubre. He rehearsed lighting the fuse so the explosion would occur precisely at 5 p.m.
Saturday, after dockworkers had gone home for the day. Something went wrong. The explosion occurred an hour and 21 minutes early, causing from 88 to 101 deaths, some body parts landed into sea leaving mangled charred stumps and torsos, legs and teeth, marinated in a red tide, and scores upon scores more injured, and countless body parts strewn by the dock. Jack Evans learned of the plot the afternoon two days before the explosion, and actually saw the dockworker light a three-inch length of fuse to time it. It burned for 15 minutes. He also saw the package of dynamite. A group opposed to Fidel Castro government’s leaning toward the Soviets was behind the plot.
“I could show you where it left a burn mark,” Evans told a reporter in Miami.
He said he went to Havana in January after corresponding with Comandante Bill A. Morgan (born in Cleveland, Ohio), an American revolutionary now in the Cuban army who had risen in rank after doing well in a number of battles. Rumors persisted that Morgan (nicknamed El Americano) was in the employ of the CIA, but they were only rumors that blurred the truth, the startling truth that Bill Morgan he had gone to Cuba all on his own, rogue solo.
Revolutionary was still a profession. He joined the circus at 14 after being kicked out of two schools, worked as a small-timer in the mob, went AWOL in the army, and then married a snake charmer in Miami. Finally, tired of life as a convicted felon searching for honest work, he began running guns between the mob and Cuba, a country with a building revolution that Morgan’s adventurism sent him running toward at full speed.
In February 1959 fresh after the Revolution, Fidel looked like a hero. The host of the tonight show, Jack Paar, later joked: “I interviewed Fidel Castro once and he immediately turned anti-American. Of course, it may have been coincidental.” Paar was another Ohioan.
Graydon Miller in his youth wrote multiple letters the never came back from New Canaan, CT, soliciting career advice from Mr. Paar. He never wrote back, and it may suggest a surfeit of fame: truly a case where he’d made enough money and sat back to enjoy it. Even though Miller suspected that Paar, as good as he was, a natural homebody and on some deeper resented the price of fame and being stopped by yokels on the streets, even years later, who’d say: “Hey, didn’t you used to be somebody.”
To get in with the rebels, Bill Morgan made up a vengeance story. He claimed that he wanted to fight Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista, a kick down suck up US-backed ruler who cooperated with the American Mafia and sold out the country to US and foreign businessmen — 70 percent of Cuban land was owned by Americans and other foreign landowners. Dreadfully out of shape, Morgan eventually found himself hiking to the Escambray Mountains in central Cuba, the stronghold of the Second Front, a militant group fighting separately from Fidel Castro’s 26th of July Movement. Members of the Second Front joked that Morgan was so overweight that he had to be CIA.
Morgan commanded a rebel firing squad which executed many former government officials and hatched an “invasion” plot which led a planeload of anti-Castro men into a Cuban army trap. These are glorious things that one simply cannot do in Cleveland, Ohio. This would be redemption for all the misdeeds and mischief of his teen years.
Jack Evans, a veteran of the Korean War, said he did odd jobs and served as Morgan’s bodyguard until March 1, when he was given an assignment to buy cotton seed and machinery for beginning cotton cultivation on 100,000 acres in Cuba. He displayed a letter of introduction signed “Dr. Fidel Castro” which told of his assignment to get the seeds for the Ministry of Agriculture. He reported that he was to head to Chicago from Havana that weekend to begin his buying expedition. Meanwhile, Evans said he lived, in Morgan’s house on 16th St. in the Vedado section.
Last Thursday, said Evans; while visiting an oceanfront home in Havana, he learned of the plot to blow up the munitions ship.
“I could show you the burn mark on the floor where the piece of fuse was timed,” he said.
Saturday afternoon the ship pulled into dock, crammed to the gunwales with munitions and about three o’clock it exploded, and a blaze started to burn. All the dogs of the city barked.
Castro stirred the public into an anti-American frenzy through the radio and the few TV sets. Police, firemen and troops swarmed to the scene in the same harbor where the U.S.S. Maine had exploded 62 years before, under suspicious circumstances, just in time to go up in smoke with the second detonation at 4:00 p.m. Smaller explosions followed this tremendous blast until the whole ship caught on fire, the stern sank like a wounded whale and the blaze finally guttered out.
