Morgan went on, “I write these things as they run through my mind so that by reading this you might better know what kind of man is your son. . . . Raising a boy like me was not an easy task or did we always agree what was the right thing to do. But I have always worshipped you and dad.” He told his mother, “Don’t cry for me. I know that you understand. The life of a man is in the hands of god and he calls when he is ready for us. It is very few who are fortunate enough to have time to prepare to meet him. If now is my time I will be ready and am looking at death not with fear but with expectation. God bless you. . . . Until we meet again, take care of Olga and the children.”

Loretta could not so easily accept his fate, and launched a furious campaign to save him. She enlisted the local office of the F.B.I. and contacted the White House, which responded, “We fully understand and deeply sympathize with your anxiety for your son.”

After Cuban officials denied Morgan’s request to talk to his mother, he asked if he could say goodbye to Rodríguez. Again, he was refused. So Morgan sent her a letter, knowing that the only thing that could ever separate them was upon them. “As a writer of love letters I am not so good,” he said. “To tell you that I love you, it’s not sufficient, because words could never express my feelings towards you. Since the first time I saw you in the mountains until the last time I saw you in prison, you have been my love, my happiness, my companion in life and in my thoughts during my moment of death.” He regretted how little time they had spent together, and he recalled the “beautiful plans” that they had made to settle in the “mountains with the girls, living in peace and tranquility.”

He tried to console her, assuring her that he was not afraid, and did not consider death “an enemy.” Though some members of the Second Front had vowed to retaliate if he was killed, Morgan told Rodríguez that he did not want anyone to seek revenge on his behalf, not even against the bodyguards who had betrayed him. “They are young and will have to fight with their conscience,” he said. “I do not want blood spilled over my cause. . . . It’s better that I die because I have defended lives. I only ask that someday the truth will be known and that my daughters will be proud of their father.” He told her, “I have great peace in my spirit,” because at least she and the girls were safe.

In fact, things were in tumult. A few days earlier, a distraught Rodríguez had learned that several of their allies were planning a last-minute assault on La Cabaña. In a kind of delirium, Rodríguez—who later cut her hair short and dyed it black, as she had when she first went into the mountains—told the wife of the Brazilian Ambassador that she needed to leave for a few days. Protect my daughters until I return, she said. The Ambassador’s wife, with whom she had grown close, pleaded with her not to go. “I have to save William,” Rodríguez said. Carrying her .32, she slipped into the trunk of a waiting car, and raced away.

Morgan, meanwhile, was granted permission to see his girls, and one of Rodríguez’s relatives brought them to La Cabaña. Morgan was briefly allowed to talk to them, to hold them. Morgan told Rodríguez, in his letter, “Let them know someday who their father was, and what my beliefs and ideals were.” Earlier, he’d sent a note to Bill, his son from his second marriage, who was now four. Saying that he could “speak from experience, most of it hard,” Morgan told him, “Love your God—and Your Country—and Stand Up for both,” adding, “And I know that your Country . . . will Always be proud of you.” In his letter to Anne, he had said:

When the time comes for you to get married and have a family of your own. Pick a good man Baby—One with his head high but both feet on the ground—And if you find one who wants to see the world—or dreams of castles in the sky—let him see the world—honey—by himself—Possibly you may never see this letter. But if you do, remember your dad was one of those people—who saw the world—And its very hard for those who love such a man.

Not long after Rodríguez left the Brazilian Embassy, Castro’s forces smashed the plot to liberate Morgan, killing or arresting many of the conspirators. Rodríguez, meanwhile, sought refuge in a safe house, in Santa Clara.

Late in the evening on March 11th, Carreras was taken before the firing squad and shot. Five minutes afterward, Morgan—who had made his plea to speak with Castro directly—was brought outside. Morgan prayed the whole way, then removed the rosary around his neck and gave it to a priest, asking that his mother receive it. As he had written her, “I leave a love of God and country.”

Through the floodlights, Morgan peered at the muzzles of the rifles. There was no longer any hope of escape. No more castles in the sky.

According to a prisoner’s account, a voice in the distance shouted, “Kneel and beg for your life.”

It was the last thing that Morgan could control. “I kneel for no man,” he said.

One of the executioners shot him in the right knee. The Yankee comandante tried to stay on his feet, blood spilling around him. Then he was shot in the left knee. Finally, he collapsed, and was repeatedly shot in the torso and head. His face, a witness said, was “blown off.”

“Many of the men in the patio were crying,” the prisoner who had provided medicine recalled. “The rumbling, that almost rose to the pitch of a riot, was a tribute to William Morgan’s popularity.” Rodríguez, sequestered in the safe house, did not yet know of her husband’s death, but she felt a presence in her room. “I saw William,” she says. “I felt him give me a kiss. No sound. Just the warmth of a kiss.”

Menoyo, who learned of his friend’s death while being held at an immigration detention center in McAllen, Texas, says, “It was like I lost a part of me.”

When Morgan’s lawyer called Loretta to break the news, she dropped the phone. Morgan’s daughter Anne, who was with her at the time, says, “I remember my grandmother falling down on the floor, screaming and crying. That is a memory I will never forget.”

After Morgan was killed, Herbert Matthews sent Ernest Hemingway a letter. By then, Matthews, who once claimed that he had “invented” Castro, had seen his reputation collapse as his reporting on Cuba was exposed as gullible and partisan. In his letter, he told Hemingway, “There were even some pickets parading in front of the Times last Saturday bearing placards against me.” Matthews was rattled by Castro’s decision to execute Morgan. He reread the “very moving” statement that Morgan had sent him from the mountains, and told Hemingway, “Here was an obviously uneducated and very simple, tough guy who yet went to Cuba, as he says, to fight for the American principles of freedom and against Communism. He went on doing so for so long that he got himself executed.” Matthews said that he thought Morgan’s saga was “like an Ernest Hemingway story,” adding, “if anybody writes it, it should be you.”