UNITED STATES—”But I won’t. I’m never… Ever going back to Cuba,” Lee Evans vowed. “I’m headed West, and they’ll never find me on the Oklahoma or Texas ranches.”
That Oklahoma thing had legs. Maybe sloppy reporting on the part of the Miami rag, seeking to boost circulation, reported the reporter who needed a strong lead. This stuff was front page. What better lead than that Oklahoma cowboy named, when branded a dangerous criminal, Jack Lee Evans?
Lee Oswald, for example, was just plain old Lee, but he went down in the history he craved, as Lee Harvey Oswald. The “headed west to Oklahoma or Texas” helped brush over Evan’s tracks. That’s for darn sure. Evans claimed he went to the ship with Bill Morgan and several others before the explosion and helped unload machine guns and ammo from the ship onto a truck to ‘take to the INRA (the acronym of Spanish for the Ministry of Agrarian Reform) where young Evans showed others how to assemble them.
He looked over the munitions cargo and saw many cases of rifles and machine guns of Czechoslovakian make; hand grenades, ammunition, flame throwers and the highly combustible liquid used in them, and a large supply of napalm (jelled gasoline) stamped “Made in America” but imported from Europe. That’s the stuff that made the two big kabooms,” Jack Lee Evans declared. Evans said he made no effort to tell anyone that the ship was to be sabotaged. Asked why he didn’t tell Morgan, he said:
“Morgan never tells you nothing, and you never tell Morgan nothing.”
The Oklahoman said he was on the 18th floor of the INRA building with Capt. Antonio Nuñez Jimenez, INRA director when the explosion occurred and had a bird’s eye view. “It hit with an awful blast,” he said. “Everybody ran to the window and looked across town to where the smoke arose. The secretaries’ office thought the power plant had exploded one got a bit hysterical because the husband worked at the plant. “Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara was on the floor below us, and Morgan was downstairs somewhere. They all hopped into their cars and headed for the explosion scene.
“As soon as they were gone, I went down and hurried to Morgan’s home where I picked up my clothes, then went to the airport. I got aboard the next plane for Miami. Do you think Morgan was in on the sabotage plot, Evans was asked…Evans replied: “No, sir, I don’t think so. He probably knew nothing about it.”
In Havana, Morgan vehemently denied he’d been aboard the ship with Evans, commenting: “The kid has to be out of his mind. He’s off his rocker to say a thing like that. It’s crazy.” Still, Prime Minister Castro, in one of his six-hour speeches, alarmed the United States for the explosion on the French ship. (Morgan said Evans came to Cuba two weeks ago looking for a job “to help the revolution.”
Morgan confirmed that Evans had stayed at his home and Morgan, El Americano, helped him get a job with the National Institute of Agrarian Reform. Which administers Castro’s land redistribution program. Morgan declared that the young Oklahoman was in no way connected with his own staff. Oklahoman! He was a Hoosier, for gods’ sake.
Lee Evans received a Miami Herald wrapped from a friend. A cowboy hat inside. The paper yellowed, he always chuckled about Oklahoma cowboy, it grew legs. Then he remembered that he himself had said it, to cover his tracks. Gosh was he glad to be back on American soil. I guess you know you’re an American when you miss it so much and it’s there before your eyes with all the hope and promise. At a memorial after the explosion a bearded Morgan was pictured walking arm-in-arm down the streets of Havana. And there’s one guy there in a tie and business suit, who doesn’t quite fit in. Bill Morgan was vocal in his belief, even after Bautista left the country, that Cuba would become a parliamentary money-making democracy. Heck, the island-nation contained a whole facsimile of the U.S, Congress!
Morgan wedded Olga María Rodríguez Farinas, also a revolutionary. Two daughters they had. In August 1959, the FBI and American authorities stripped Morgan of U.S. citizenship. On September 24, 1959, Morgan renounced his U.S. citizenship on a Havana radio station. After he left the radio station, Morgan was immediately arrested for counter-revolutionary activity by Castro’s forces.
To be continued…
