Mr. REYES. They are barracks that normally, before Castro, used to hold 100 people. Now these barracks, without any extension or any remodeling, hold 300, 400, and 500 people. They are put together like in a prison.

Mr. FASCELL. Is that men, women, and children, regardless of age? Mr. REYES. They separate men from women, but regardless of the

age.

Mr. FASCELL. How about the children?

Mr. REYES. The children are taken away. The families are split. The main goal of Castro is to divide the Cuban family, divide and conquer, Machiavelli's theory. The men are put in one field in the Oriente part of Cuba, the wife is put in another camp in the Occidental part of Cuba, and maybe the son is sent to another camp in the middle of the island.

Mr. GROSS. Are they permitted to get together on a periodic basis? Mr. REYES. I have been told that sometimes once in a year or once each 2 years they can meet together, but most of the time they are separated just waiting for the telegram to go to Mantanzas and take the freedom flight.

Mr. GROSS. I take it, then, that the barracks in which they are located is surrounded by wire and guards.

Mr. REYES. Yes, sir; and they are not allowed to leave the place. It is a concentration camp with military guards all around, so they cannot leave the place. They have to meet an enormous quota that is almost impossible, planting beets and cutting cane. It is almost impossible. Mr. GROSS. They are not paid?

Mr. REYES. I have been told they are paid 7 pesos a month. Then they have to pay for their meals. They have to pay for the things that the regime gives to them. Most of the time, when they have finished they owe money to the regime.

Mr. ROYBAL. I came in a little late, but it seems to me he is telling us about prisoners in Cuba.

Mr. FASCELL. We are talking about the people who have applied to come to the United States, Mr. Roybal. The question I asked Mr. Reyes is what happened to them after they applied. He was just describing their condition.

Mr. ROYBAL. As an outsider, just coming in and listening to the tail end of your testimony, it seems to me they are made prisoners the moment they apply.

Mr. REYES. Exactly. That is what I was saying in my statement, sir, and in answering the question. They are actually prisoners in concentration camps of the Castro regime. They are considered the garbage of the nation because they have applied to get out and come to the United States, which is the focal point of hate of Fidel Castro.

Mr. ROYBAL. How long a time does it take from application to final disposition?

Mr. REYES. To come to the United States? Sometimes 3 years, 4 years, 2 years. It depends.

Mr. ROYBAL. During all that time, they are in these concentration camps and are paid 7 pesos a day?

Mr. REYES. Seven pesos a month. Seven Cuban pesos, which is right. now a 10-cent dollar, unofficially.

Mr. FASCELL. Are there any reports of deaths? I would think that elderly people, who have to work under those conditions, would probably have a very difficult time.

Mr. REYES. Mr. Chairman, we have reports that a great number of people are dying, especially the elderly people, in these concentration camps. There have been reports at Freedom House when they come here that sometimes they have had a heart attack because they are so weak, and that they have died. There are not so many at Freedom House. I believe there are only two or three since the freedom flights have started, but there are reports of very bad health conditions.

They have like a rash under the skin that is produced by the lack of vitamins, by the lack of proteins, because these people are treated actually like prisoners.

Mr. FASCELL. We had some testimony earlier that they have been noticing more and more cases of malnutrition among the Cubans who are arriving on the airlift. I was just wondering what the refugee community had learned.

Mr. REYES. In fact, they have sometimes to go slow in eating the food here because they are not used to it. It is like a prisoner who has been 2 or 3 years or 10 years in a camp and, all of a sudden, they face the proteins and vitamins and they have to go slow. A person cannot come here and eat immediately. It has to be a slow process sometimes.

AMERICAN YOUTH TRAVEL TO CUBA

Mr. GROSS. You know, of course, of the hippies and peaceniks in this country who go to Canada and, by circuitous means, then go to Cuba to help with the harvest. Do these people, to your knowledge, come in contact with these people who are held in concentration camps awaiting shipment to the United States? Do you know whether they ever make contact or not?

Mr. REYES. To my knowledge-and the people I have interviewed, Cubans coming from the island, plus sources of the undergroundthese American youngsters who have gone to Cuba have never been in touch with these concentration camps.

Mr. GROSS. They do not run into them in the harvest fields, then? Mr. REYES. As far as we are concerned, the reports that we have is that these youngsters went to Cuba to cut a token amount of sugar cane. Actually, they did not go there to cut cane. They just cut a token amount of sugar cane just to say that they had cut cane.

Mr. GROSS. In other words, they are there for publicity and propaganda purposes.

GUERRILLA TRAINING IN CUBA

Mr. REYES. We cannot forget that in Cuba there are more than 80 guerrilla training schools, and Castro has opened these guerrilla training schools to train not only Cubans but all people of the hemisphere, and also of Asia and Africa, following the tricontinental Communist conference in Cuba held in January 1966. They pledged to make revolution in the three continents. These guerrilla schools are right now in effect, operating in Cuba.

The big camp for the foreigners is in Pinar Real near Havana, called May Fifth. This is the training camp, the top, No. 1. They have

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also these guerrilla training schools in many other activities. It is not only teaching them to make molotov cocktails, as we have been informed, but also when they go in as a sports group or in an educational way to a conference, to another nation, they are trained and prepared to develop their so-called doctrine.

Mr. FASCELL. The people in Cuba who have applied to come to the United States are sent to separate camps, you say?

Mr. REYES. Yes, sir.

Mr. FASCELL. Is the location of these sugar fields where the applicants are cutting cane or working or living, identifiable?

Mr. REYES. I can tell you this, Mr. Chairman. As you will remember, President Johnson on October 3, 1965, was the one who extended an official invitation for the first time in the history of the United States and Cuba so the Cuban people could come to the United States. Many times these people are identified in a derogatory way by the Castro regime as the "Johnson brigade."

Mr. FASCELL. They also call them worms, do they not?

Mr. REYES. Yes.

Mr. FASCELL. What is the Spanish name for worm?

Mr. REYES. G-u-s-a-n-o, gusano. It means worm.

Mr. GROSS. A lower form of life.

Mr. REYES. Yes. And Castro is called "the horse." Never forget, the worms always eat the horse.

CASTRO'S 26TH OF JULY ANNIVERSARY SPEECH

Mr. ROYBAL. What significance do you attach to the statement Castro made that if the people of Cuba want to, they can remove him? I understand he made such a statement a few days ago.

Mr. REYES. I think that statement was, if the Cuban people want to remove him, he can be removed, to be exact. He said that last night, according to the information I have on this meeting of the 26th of July in Cuba to celebrate his heinous revolution. Castro has been saying so many things. One day he said, "I am not a Communist." He came here to meet the press, in this program coast to coast, and he said, "I am not a Communist." A lady asked him, "Are you a Communist?" and he bluntly rejected it.

Then the woman asked the same question in another way: "If there is a confrontation between the East and the West, what will be your position?" And Castro said, "I am a pro-Western man, and I will be with the Western World."

Two years later, December 1, 1961, he said, "I am a Marxist-Leninist and will be until the day I die."

Just before he came into power, he said he would not impose military service in Cuba; and later on you have seen that he has converted Cuba into a military camp.

So, we cannot believe him. I do not attribute to this statement any value, because the words of Castro are not to be taken on the level. Mr. ROYBAL. He has not set up the machinery for an election of any kind, so he cannot possibly be removed except by force. What he has said is merely a statement that sounded good at the time he was making the speech.

Mr. REYES. I believe so, sir. We have to face the fact that he has a tremendous failure in the sugar cane crop. He said he was going to make 10 million tons, and he announced just a few days ago that they reached only 812 million tons. Some experts of the Western World believe that he did not reach 6 million tons.

The point is, what is the future? What cane will he cut for the next harvest? After all the promises that he made to the Cuban people that the ration book would be cut, all the promises he made of joy and happiness that he made for July 26th-what has happened? Just a small meeting on the Civic Plaza. People were forced to go again over there, and that is all.

SPLIT IN CASTRO'S REGIME

There is one big split in the Castro regime. I want to state, as I said it before the Senate just a few weeks ago, on the military side of the Castro regime there are many members of the Castro armed forces who are tired and fed up with Castro. When the militiaman, when the man in the army or the air force or navy is in the military barracks getting a little bit of food, he does not know if at that time his wife or children are having meals. This is very dramatic, but it is true. You cannot support an army with an empty belly. Castro has been promising and promising, and not fulfilling one of the promises that he has made.

The army realizes that there is no future for them and for the nation but more isolation, more hate and more destruction.

Mr. ROYBAL. Isn't there a ray of hope that the army may turn against him and perhaps really get rid of him?

Mr. REYES. I am deeply convinced of that, sir.

Mr. ROYBAL. So you figure there is a real possibility that this may happen?

TREATMENT OF CASTRO'S PRISONERS

Mr. REYES. If you realize the trend of the Castro regime, how he began, and the people he has purged up to now, all those who remain. are Raoul and himself plus Dorticos and the regular hard core Communists. It seems the regime is cracking down. We have proved that. We could not have this before [indicating]. This is a letter from a Cuban prisoner where the prisoners put on a strike for 30-some days in the last year. This letter came to my hand. I cannot say how, but it came to my hand. These people were making an appeal to the world, saying that they were very badly treated, that they were put in jails without any light. They were asking for vitamins, for something, because the muscles of their eyes were becoming bad. They could not even see. The Castro regime said the vitamins and the food are for the brigades cutting cane. Thirty-four of them were taken out of the prison and nobody knows where they are.

Sure, Castro closed the prisons like Isle of Pines. He said, "We don't have prisoners," but the prisoners who were in Isle of Pines were taken throughout the island. He closed the Cabana Fortress, but they are spread in all the concentration camps that he has throughout the island.

Cuba itself today is a big concentration camp under the Castro regime, where he is holding 7 million people. If you want a copy of the letter, I have it in English.

Mr. GROSS. What was that published in?

Mr. REYES. This letter was printed on international wire services. Mr. GROSS. Was it printed in any paper?

Mr. REYES. Newspaper?

Mr. GROSS. In Cuba?

Mr. REYES. No, sir; not in Cuba. It was smuggled out by a Cuban prisoner. I have a copy of the letter just in case you want it. It was quoted in different wire systems after it came to my hand. I sent it to all the Presidents of the Western Hemisphere, to the OAS, and to the United Nations, making the appeal.

(The document provided by Mr. Reyes follows:)

OCTOBER 20, 1969.

OPEN LETTER TO THE EXILE AND PUBLIC OPINION

(Letter smuggled out from the Cuban prison and received in Miami by Dr. Manolo Reyes on December 9, 1969)

This letter comes to you from a Cuban political prison, 20 days after a 35 days hunger strike was finished without medical assistance; our situation is very difficult. We have heard of the support and preoccupation of the Cuban exile that had knowledge of this hunger strike, the confinement, abolishing of visitors and the inhuman conditions in general we are submitted by Castro communist regime.

Once the strike was over, only intraveinous and sugared water was given to us, and a few days later some boiled plantains. This has been all. We have been denied medical assistance. We have not been given a single vitamin pill. The food is only boiled macaroni and broth with noodles. Men are falling by bunches. Diarrhea and vomits are killing us. Dozens of prisoners with polineuritis end being cripples because there are no vitamins or adequate food for men that after years of physical mistreatment, sick and starved, spend 35 days on a hunger strike.

We have had many cases of pellagra and many other illness due to lack of the most necessary food to survive. Lack of proteins is total. Many prisoners suffering from weakness of eye muscles have almost lost sight. A great amount of elderly people with chronic illness before the strike, now are almost dead.

We have asked for medical assistance, adequate medicines and food, but the Communists have answered that all they have is for those who have scholarships and the sugar cane cutters.

Yet we don't know about what have happened with 34 other prisoners that were taken away after the strike was over, due to their critical condition. Not even their relatives have been told about their condition or the place they are being held. There are rumors that six have passed away in the Principe Castle, plus the one that died before.

Our situation is desperate. We are secluded, where we can not see the sun or have any kind of help. Would it be necessary that we condemn to death the elders and the most critical ones? . . . Yes, because if we start another strike they will die first. Our situation is unbearable and the youngest of us have decided to wait and to expect some help from the exile and our families in order to avoid another strike that will kill many of the prisoners who would not be able, due to their critical condition to resist another strike.

Is necessary that this situation would be denounced and known by the whole world. Publicity is necessary . . . in your hands is the relaxation of this situation. We have been told that are on exile the commissions created when we started the strike. Let them know of this letter. . . of this call for help.

Let know Mr. U-Thant and the Commission of Human Rights, that we are being killed little by little and that many of us will die here and thousands without medical care will become cripples and blind for the rest of their lives. We trust you brothers . . . Down with the Communism . . . Long live Free Cuba.