by newspaper, by everything. So we never had any effective propaganda really. My personal opinion is that you have to attack the communists.

You can't just sit by and let them say what they please. There are lots of things that you could tell about the communists which haven't been told in Latin America.

Mr. ZION. Do you think it would be feasible, and would this be something that would be tax supported by American citizens, to initiate radio stations and broadcast this?

Mrs. PHILLIPS. I don't know why the Americans are paying no attention to Latin America. Latin America is the most important place in the world today for the United States because the Latin American countries are all turning to the communists.

Look at the countries you have. Chile-communists were elected there Allende. Peru-following the communist pattern. Bolivia has been following it till lately, when they had another upset. Just what this chap will do, I don't know, but he hasn't turned back the Gulf Oil Company yet.

The Americans are losing all their investments in Latin America. When the communists talk about expropriation, they mean confiscation. They are not going to pay for anything.

Mr. ZION. I was in Cuba in about 1961 trying to save some of the assets of American corporations, so I know what you are talking about. You have mentioned Chile and Peru and Bolivia, I believe. What other Latin American countries, in your opinion, have had a great increase in communist influence during the past, say, 10 years?

Mrs. PHILLIPS. You take Colombia. It has had a great increase in communist activity. They have guerrillas in the hills. Colombia can never be really developed until they get rid of the guerrillas. Originally they were bandits.

Now, for example, there is Tiro Fijo. He was a bandit for 20 years. Suddenly he gets uniforms, he gets rank in his group, he gets more people, he gets arms and ammunition, apparently sent, as far as the military told me, by Castro.

So he declares himself as a communist. Okay. But then there is another group of students in the north part of Colombia. Fijo is in the southeast part. There is another group of students and probably workers, and so forth, who are fighting in the northeast part of the country.

But the point of this is not guerrilla warfare-I don't pay too much attention to guerrilla warfare because it has more nuisance value than anything else. What is really of value is that Colombia recognized the Soviet Union. I think practically all of the Latin American countries have recognized the Soviet Union and have diplomatic relations. Then the Soviet Embassies become the center of propaganda, subversion, and handout money.

Montevideo has been the center for the last 15 years, and Uruguay has practically gone communist. In the first place, they are bankrupt because they are a welfare state. The second point is that the Tupamaros is a communist group. They kidnapped two Americans, both of the U.S. Embassy. One was killed and one they turned loose not long ago. They are practically taking over the country.

(At this point Mr. Ashbrook left the hearing room.)

Mrs. PHILLIPS. Now you take Brazil. Brazil, of course, has a military regime, and Costelo Branco was President after the revolution. He was going to get rid of the communists, get them out of the labor unions and out of the schools. He could never do that. They are very strong there today.

The military government in Argentina is just hanging on by its teeth. They are fighting among themselves, which is ridiculous. Im Venezuela Caldera is President. The first thing he did was legalize the communist party. Then the communists made a statement 2 or 3 days later saying, what we are going to do is put you (Caldera) out of there. So they are having trouble. They have a few guerrillas so far, but it is not the guerrillas that are the danger.

It is the terrorism inside cities and the fact that the communists are penetrating labor, the government, and getting the key positions. That is where your danger comes from, and the United States has done nothing to combat it.

Take, for example, the Alliance for Progress. Basically, it is a good idea, but the Alliance for Progress has caused inflation in Latin America. The U.S. has poured millions of dollars into these countries indiscriminately, so the gap today between the poor and rich is even wider than it was before you started.

Mr. ZION. Even the Alliance for Progress has done more to enhance the rich and little to help the poor?

Mrs. PHILLIPS. The American economists went to these countries and said, "You must industrialize." That was the last thing they needed. What they needed was to grow food. The Americans are much enamored of the idea of breaking up big estates. So every country passed an agrarian reform law. The words "agrarian reform" are really a communist phrase, but we still call it agrarian reform. It was a great political idea. The politicians grabbed that to get votes. So they frightened all of the big landowners, and many of them just quit growing food. Chile, for example, imported a lot of food, but today I think they are importing something like $200 million, and food is very high. What the United States should have done was to tell the big landowners that they would give them loans for modern machinery providing that they furnish good houses for their workers and that they establish schools, not only for their children, but for the farmers to teach them how to farm. The peasants really don't know how to farm efficiently. The landowners also should have been asked to pay the farmers fairly decent wages, and then force them to grow so much. food.

The food supply is going down all the time in Latin America. Your population is increasing.

Mr. ZION. The food supply is going down?

Mrs. PHILLIPS. The food supply is going down in every country. Food prices are getting higher all the time, and the population is increasing tremendously. U.S. AID has been trying to do something about population, but we have been very timid about it. It has to be a national project or it won't work.

Mr. ZION. I think you have given us pretty much a country-bycountry report on the spread of communism. Do you, of your own

knowledge, know of exported communism from Latin America to the United States?

You mentioned that the Soviet Union Embassy in each of these countries was sort of a hotbed of influence, a center of influence or propaganda, communist style. Has this, to your knowledge, been exported to the United States?

Mrs. PHILLIPS. I frankly think, even when I was there, Castro didn't call it that, but he was trying to organize black power. Actually, a lot of it started right there in Cuba. I think it was Williams, the Negro who used to come to my office-Later he went to Red Chinawho first mentioned it to me. He had a radio program called Radio Free Dixie. It was broadcast to the United States.

In Miami they say that 5 percent of the people who have come from Cuba are Castro agents.

Oh, yes, one of Castro's aims is to destroy the United States. Hadn't you heard? He is always saying so.

Mr. ZION. You mentioned that 5 percent might be Castro agents. There have been literally thousands of people, perhaps millions. We have testimony from previous witnesses. They have come to Miami from Cuba. It was presumed that a substantial percentage were of two classes; one to sort of keep Castro informed about the back-to-Cuba movement-an anti-Castro movement here-and the other would be anti-American Castro agents. As you said, 5 percent

Mrs. PHILLIPS. That is not my figure. That is a figure that is talked around Miami.

Mr. ZION. Do you think that Castro feels he has enough of his agents in this country? Or do you think the fact that they have discontinued these freedom flights, or whatever you want to call them, would that reduce the Castro influence in this country?

Mrs. PHILLIPS. I don't think so. After all, they come and go from Cuba as if it were between Brooklyn and New York. Fishing boats go out. The Coast Guard checks the number on board; they don't check their credentials or anything.

Mr. ZION. The fishing boats leave from Florida?

Mrs. PHILLIPS. From Florida. They disappear for a day or two and come back. They are probably going to a small island and exchanging personnel. They are going back and forth between Cuba and Florida all the time-I mean, Castro agents.

Mr. ZION. Do you feel that some people were aware of the fact that Castro was a potential communist and perhaps wanted to favorably influence our attitude toward Castro in spite of the fact they knew of his communist leanings?

Mrs. PHILLIPS. You know the American Communist Party, way back in 1935, said that the best thing to do is take Cuba. I think most of the people were simply deceived. I am sure the press was. As far as I am concerned, I wasn't very much deceived, but I think that was true.

The American people were deceived, and Castro certainly deceived the Cubans, at least 90 percent of them. There is many an exile in Miami that used to come to my office and complain that I was writing against Castro. Now they are in exile.

Castro won by propaganda, remember, not by guerrilla warfare— only propaganda. He sat up in the mountains with an American-made

radio station and told the people how he was going to respect private property, et cetera.

Mr. ZION. And elections.

Mrs. PHILLIPS. And elections.

(At this point Mr. Schmitz left the hearing room.)

Mrs. PHILLIPS. The only thing I can say about the Batista regime I knew Batista since he was a sergeant is that he called himself a democratic dictator, which I thought was pretty funny. However, there is no comparison between the dictatorship of Batista and the one you have today.

Now Castro has executed around 20,000 people-Cubans-six Americans. A chap named Clark Anderson was executed just around the time of the Bay of Pigs.

Mr. ZION. I believe a previous witness gave us a much higher figure of those that had been executed, and he gave us a figure from his memory of those that were being held captive. Would you care to estimate the number of political captives being held by Castro?

Mrs. PHILLIPS. The last figure I saw was 100,000, but Castro himself said there were 80,000.

Mr. ZION. It was the 80,000 figure I used previously.

Mrs. PHILLIPS. The previous figure is 80,000 because Castro said it himself. They are being held in ordinary prisons and forced labor camps. And I have a clipping here, which I would like to put into the record, about the tiger cages. It indicates the way they are treating prisoners.

Mr. ZION. May I request, Mr. Chairman, that the tiger cage article be made part of the record at this point?

Mr. PEPPER. It will be so included in the record.

(Document marked Committee Exhibit No. 6. See appendix, pages 5671-5674.)

Mrs. PHILLIPS. Castro's Cuba still has forced labor camps. I used to know a powerful labor leader in Cuba. About 3 months ago he came to see me and brought his son who had been in a labor camp for 5 months. He was a good size chap. He had gone down to 90 pounds, and he described the horrible conditions under which the forced labor worked.

I went to the trials. There were no trials really. It was simply a farce. I went to Cabana Fortress one night at 11 o'clock, and they were trying a young man. He wasn't very old. They said he had betrayed someone to the Batista authorities 2 years before!

They had no witnesses against him. They only had the report. They had no witnesses for the defense. The judges were three young boys, 17 years old, who drank Coca Cola all during the trial and didn't even listen. He had a lawyer appointed by the court who apologized for defending him.

(At this point Mr. Schmitz returned to the hearing room.)

Mrs. PHILLIPS. That was at 11 o'clock. The trial was over by 12. He was dead by 2 o'clock in the moat where they had been killing one after another. It is the big moat of Cabana Fortress. It is a huge moat built in the Spanish days. The moat must have been very, very wide, much wider than this building. They put the jeeps on the outer rim to throw light into the moat and they shot the accused against the wall on the

other side. It was right below the bridge where you went across the moat, so every time you passed you could see the brown stain of the blood of the ones that were executed there.

Mr. ZION. Can you recall when you first became aware of Fidel Castro and under what circumstances you became aware of him? Mrs. PHILLIPS. In 1953 he organized a revolutionary group. They attacked the Moncada barracks. There were about 100 people killed, including soldiers and his own men.

Mr. ZION. Was he still a student at that time?

Mrs. PHILLIPS. No. He had already been to Bogota, Colombia, in 1948. He and a group went there for the purpose of disrupting a conference. When Gaitan was shot, Castro participated in the riots.

Mr. ZION. As far as you recall from your own knowledge, was Castro's first real active interest as a revolutionary around 1953?

Mrs. PHILLIPS. That is the first open one. Then he went to the University of Havana. He belonged to one of the revolutionary groups. In those days they had armed groups in the university.

Mr. ZION. This was part of '53.

Mrs. PHILLIPS. No. Then, of course, he went with the Cayo Confitas, that group who tried to attack the Dominican Republic, and the U.S. stopped him. That was around Grau San Martin's time. They were going to overthrow Trujillo if they could. He was mixed up in

that.

He was supposed to have swum ashore and never got arrested. He had a long list of revolutionary activities. Then, of course, after he was put in prison, after the 1953 affair, Batista declared a political amnesty. In Cuba, every time they had an election, all the political prisoners were released.

Castro was released by Batista and went to Mexico. There is where he met Che Guevara and General Bayo-you remember the Spanish republican. He helped train Castro too. Bayo used to come to my

office.

At that time, after Castro returned to Cuba, Bayo established a school for guerrilla warfare. They brought people in from other countries. I talked to a boy from Peru and a boy from Panama and boys from other places, who came to Cuba for training in guerrilla warfare.

Bayo used to tell me every day he wasn't a communist, which I thought was very amusing. He had always been one so how could he believe Castro wasn't a communist. In the first place, Castro hated the United States, so naturally he turned to the Soviet Union.

Mr. ZION. I have no further questions. Thank you very much, Mrs. Phillips.

Mr. PEPPER. Mr. Schmitz?

Mr. SCHMITZ. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I have a copy of Mrs. Phillips' article of February 15, 1970, "CASTRO'S CUBA—LET'S TELL IT LIKE IT IS!" I would like unanimous consent to include it in the record.

Mr. PEPPER. Without objection, it is so ordered.

(Document marked Committee Exhibit No. 7. See appendix, pages 5675-5678.)

Mr. SCHMITZ. Mrs. Phillips, you were in Cuba after Castro took over. We have heard witnesses in this committee testify that more people are killed under communism after they take over than during