Improbable Frogman

On a lakeside ranch 20 miles southwest of Havana, the croak of 500,000 bullfrogs filled the air last week, and the reek of tanning frogskins drifted up from a row of concrete tanks. Ohio-born Major William Morgan, 32, kept 120 workers hopping by barking over short-wave radio such orders as: "Slaughter 10,000 more bulls!" Morgan, the highest ranking of the Americans who served with Fidel Castro in Castro's rebellion, is carving out a new career supplying U.S. restaurants with frogs' legs.

Morgan is an adventurer and drifter who joined the U.S. Army when he was 18, served with the occupation forces in Japan, then escaped from a stockade (where he was serving three months for going AWOL) by disarming a guard. Recaptured, he was sentenced to five years in a federal penitentiary.

Seeing an opportunity for himself in Castro's sprawling program of land reform, Morgan talked the Agriculture Ministry into giving him charge of a fish hatchery. He raised carp, sunfish and black bass, read up on frogs, soon was ready to expand. Taking over 430 acres of a confiscated ranch along Lake Ariguanabo, Morgan spent $40,000 of the ministry's money digging ditches to hold his frogs, another $30,000 stocking the farm with frogs caught by peasants in the streams and marshes of western Cuba.

From his steadily building stock, Morgan is slaughtering at the rate of 13,000 frogs daily, shipping 1 1/2 tons of legs to a cannery in the nearby town of Gueines. "Cuba shipped $1,000,000 worth of frogs' legs to the U.S. last year," says Morgan. "I'm going to double that." He dehydrates the frog carcasses into "fish meal" for cattle, plans to use the skins to make purses and belts.

At his hip Frogman Morgan wears a gold-plated .45 with a bullet ready in the chamber. Tommy-gun-carrying bodyguards follow him around. He and his Cuban bride live in a six-room apartment on Havana's waterfront Malecon drive. It has 18 bunks, where the frog-farm workers, who call him "William,'' sleep whenever they come to town. His U.S. citizenship was lifted for fighting in a foreign army, and he laments that he is "running out of countries." But he professes optimism about his future in Cuba, even though "Fidel and Raul know that I'm against the Communists. The Reds tried to hold a meeting on the frog farm, and I threw them out."

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