William Morgan, a tough-talking ex-paratrooper, stunned family and friends when in 1957 he left Ohio to join freedom fighters in the mountains of Cuba. He led one band of guerrillas, and Che Guevara another, and together they swept through the country, ultimately forcing corrupt dictator Fulgencio Batista from power. In just a year of fighting, the American revolutionary had altered the landscape of the Cold War. But Morgan believed they were fighting to liberate Cuba. Then Fidel Castro canceled elections, seized properties, and imprisoned Morgan’s fellow freedom fighters. Even Morgan’s own house mysteriously blew up. But The Comandante is about more than just the revolution. It’s the story of two people in love, pressured by government agents and mobsters vying to control a nation that soon brought the world to the brink of nuclear destruction. In the mountains, Morgan met Olga Rodriguez, a beautiful, fiery nurse, whom he soon married. Together, amid their firestorm romance, they decided to take a stand and take back the government from Castro and Guevara. The newlyweds began running arms to prepare for a counterrevolution, soon caught in a cloak-and-dagger web among Castro’s forces; the Mob, which controlled Havana; and the CIA’s preparations for the Bay of Pigs Invasion. But one of Morgan’s guards betrayed him to Castro, who threw the counterrevolutionary in prison, placing his wife and their two daughters under house arrest. The couple smuggled secret messages to each other until Olga ultimately escaped by drugging her captors. Before she could free her husband, though, a junta tribunal tried and sentenced him to death by firing squad. Drawing on declassified FBI, CIA, and Army intelligence records as well as Olga’s diaries, Pulitzer Prize–winning authors Michael Sallah and Mitch Weiss skillfully reveal the inner workings of the Cuban Revolution while detailing the incredible love story of a rebel nurse and an American street hero who left their mark on history.

This is the true story of William Alexander Morgan, the Yankee Comandante, an idealistic young American who found fame fighting in the Cuban Revolution. The blond American didn't speak a word of Spanish, but he felt his rightful place was among the guerilleros of the Escambray Mountains, fighting to bring down dictator Fulgencio Batista. Morgan was among Havana's liberators in 1959, an act that led FBI director Edgar Hoover to strip him of his American citizenship. There was a time when Morgan was international front-page news, on a level with Che Guevara. Yet "el comandante yanqui" has largely disappeared from the history of the Cuban Revolution. Author Gani Jakupi recounts a forgotten tale from one of the greatest military and political events of the 20th century.

"Why do I fight here in this land so foreign to my own? Why did I come here far from my home and family?...Is it because I seek adventure? No...I am here because I believe that the most important thing for free men to do is to protect the freedom of others." —William Morgan, in a letter to Herbert Matthews at the New York Times When William Morgan was twenty-two years old, he was working as a high school janitor in Toledo Ohio. Seven years later, in 1958, he walked into a Rebel camp in the Cuban Jungle to join the revolutionaries in their fight to overthrow the corrupt Cuban president, Fulgencio Batista. They were wary of the broad-shouldered, blond-haired, blue-eyed americano but Morgan's dedication and passion, his military skill and charisma, led him to become a chief comandante in Castro's army—he was the only foreigner to hold such a rank, with the exception of Che Guevera. Vicious battles in the jungles were followed by victorious revelry in the cities. Morgan married a Cuban beauty. He single-handedly thwarted the Dominican Republic's attempt to overthrow Castro. And he was chosen to work with Castro and other high ranking Rebels to improve the quality of life for all people. This man who had lived under the radar in America was now a Cuban hero on the watch lists of several governments, all of whom wondered whose side he was really on. It all ended in 1961, when, at age thirty-two, Morgan was executed by firing squad, at the hands of Fidel Castro. Journalist Aran Shetterly takes us back to an era when democracy could have flourished in Cuba. He interviewed Morgan's friends and family and former Cuban Rebels, and examined FBI and CIA documents in search of the truth. What emerged was the true story of a young man who had never fit in but finally found his place in the world by fighting another country's war.

As Castro’s democratic reform movement veered off course, a revolution that seemed to signal the death knell of dictatorship in Latin America brought about its tragic opposite. Jonathan C. Brown examines in forensic detail how the turmoil that rocked a small Caribbean nation in the 1950s became one of the century’s most transformative events.

Based on unprecedented access to both Cuban and American officials, a book that offers fresh insight into one of history's most enigmatic relationships between nation-states—from one of America's best-known voices of political and social activism. Listen, Yankee! offers an account of Cuban politics from Tom Hayden's unique position as an observer of Cuba and as a US revolutionary student leader whose efforts to mobilize political change in the US mirrored the radical transformation simultaneously going on in Cuba. Chapters are devoted to the writings of Che Guevara, Régis Debray, and C. Wright Mills; the Cuban missile crisis; the Weather Underground; the assassination of JFK; the strong historical links between Cuba and Africa; the Carter era; the Clinton era; the Cuban Five; Elián González; and the December 17, 2014 declaration of normalization by presidents Obama and Castro. Hayden puts the present moment into historical context, and shows how we're finally finding common ground to the advantage of Cubans and Americans alike.

Son nom ne vous dit peut-être rien : William Alexander Morgan. Pourtant, en prenant parti pour les rebelles, il devint une figure majeure de la révolution cubaine, le seul comandante non cubain avec le célèbre "Che" Guevara. Ancien soldat américain, "Yankee" combattant pour la cause de Fidel Castro et les valeurs démocratiques du Segundo Frente, son implication le mènera à participer activement aux conflits avant que les bouleversements politiques ne coupent court à ses convictions. Au fil de plus de dix ans de recherches à recueillir les témoignages d'acteurs privilégiés de la révolution, tels que le commandant en chef du Segundo Frente Eloy Gutiérrez Menoyo en personne, à étudier les textes sur le personnage et à explorer les lieux habités par la rébellion castriste — obtenant ainsi des documents inédits à ce jour —, Gani Jakupi a tiré la matière nécessaire à ce véritable roman graphique, ainsi qu'il le souligne lui-même.

This intimate, revisionist portrait of Fidel Castro, showing how an unlikely young Cuban led his country in revolution and transfixed the world, is “sure to become the standard on Castro’s early life” (Publishers Weekly). Until now, biographers have treated Castro’s life like prosecutors, scouring his past for evidence to convict a person they don’t like or don’t understand. Young Castro challenges us to put aside the caricature of a bearded, cigar-munching, anti-American hothead to discover how Castro became the dictator who acted as a thorn in the side of US presidents for nearly half a century. In this “gripping and edifying narrative…Hansen brings imposing research and notable erudition” (Booklist) to Castro’s early life, showing Castro getting his toughness from a father who survived Spain’s class system and colonial wars to become one of the most successful independent plantation owners in Cuba. We see a boy running around that plantation more comfortable playing with the children of his father’s laborers than his own classmates at elite boarding schools in Santiago de Cuba and Havana. We discover a young man who writes flowery love letters from prison and contemplates the meaning of life, a gregarious soul attentive to the needs of strangers but often indifferent to the needs of his own family. These pages show a liberal democrat who admires FDR’s New Deal policies and is skeptical of communism, but is also hostile to American imperialism. They show an audacious militant who stages a reckless attack on a military barracks but is canny about building an army of resisters. In short, Young Castro reveals a complex man. The first American historian in a generation to gain access to the Castro archives in Havana, Jonathan Hansen was able to secure cooperation from Castro’s family and closest confidants. He gained access to hundreds of never-before-seen letters and interviewed people he was the first to ask for their impressions of the man. The result is a nuanced and penetrating portrait of a man at once brilliant, arrogant, bold, vulnerable, and all too human: a man who, having grown up on an island that felt like a colonial cage, was compelled to lead his country to independence.