Introduction

American Experience, originally titled ‘The American Experience’, is an American television programme and a Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) documentary series created by Peter McGhee.

Outline

When American William Morgan was executed outside a Havana prison on 11 March 1961, his strange story seemed to vanish from the popular imagination as quickly as it had appeared. It was lost in the classified archives of the Cold War, and edited out of Cuban history by Fidel Castro’s retelling of the revolution as an epic tale of a handful of men fighting under his direct command at the exclusion of all others.

William Morgan – who in his early life had been a merchant marine, an Army deserter and ex-con, a circus fire-eater (married to a snake charmer), and a street soldier for the mob – settled in Miami in 1954 at the age of 26. It was there that he first heard rumblings of a revolt on the island of Cuba. Abandoning his family, Morgan headed to Havana and soon took up arms with a guerrilla group in the Escambray Mountains. And while the men of the Second Front were initially suspicious of this strange American, Morgan quickly proved invaluable, earning the rank of comandante. What followed is a tale of a rapid rise and deadly fall of a man caught between two nations – stripped of his American citizenship, but ultimately imprisoned and executed by the Cuban regime for which he fought.

American Experience Series

A full list of the American Experience Series can be found here.

Production & Filming Details

• Creators: Peter McGhee, Henry Hampton, and Stephen Fitzmeyer.
• Production: PBS, WGBH-TV and WNET.
• Release Date: 17 November 2015 (US).
• Running time: 60 to 120 minutes.
• Country: US.
• Language: English.

YouTube Link