Vol. 25, No. 13
Monday, March 27, 1961, p.2

A Reply to New York Paper
On Case of Major Morgan

NEW YORK — The author of the following letter to the WORLD-TELEGRAM is secretary of the New York Fair Play for Cuba Committee:

Your editorial March 13 entitled "Cuban Executions" ends: "We wonder what the so-called `Fair Play for Cuba Committee' — apologist for Castro — has to say about this."

The answer is simple: we say that trials in Cuba and punishments meted out at them should be judged by Americans on the same basis as trials in other countries. Despite your assertion, we are not apologists for the Cuban government, we simply seek fair play for it. That is something which your newspaper is decidedly not giving. On the contrary, along with the rest of the daily press of this country, it is trying to whip up a lynch campaign against Cuba.

I personally am opposed to capital punishment but I cannot condemn Cuba any more for passing death sentences than I do the other nations of the world. Since your policy is not against capital punishment I cannot see any basis for your editorial on the execution of William A. Morgan — unless you believe he was innocent of the charges against him. Yet nowhere — in your news dispatches about his trial nor in your editorial — is this stated or implied.

What Evidence Was

I hasten to add that if I believed Morgan innocent and his trial a frame-up I would have raised my voice in protest. But the evidence of the witnesses at his trial, as reported in the anti-Castro press of this country, made it appear conclusive that Major Morgan had indeed been secretly delivering arms to the guerrillas in the Escambray. Since these weapons were used to kill Cuban militiamen, I doubt that there is any government in the world which would not have carried out a similar court martial with a similar verdict.

The trials which have taken place recently in Cuba should be distinguished from those which took place soon after Batista's overthrow. The latter were "war criminal" trials, patterned on the ex post facto legal principle which this country endorsed for the Nuremberg "war criminal" trials. No anti-Batista Cubans question the guilt of those so tried. Their crimes during the dictatorship, totaling at least 20,000 murdered or executed (proportionately larger than U.S. battle deaths in both world wars), were as well known to the public as those of Himmler, Eichmann and their Nazi henchmen.

By calling for revolutionary law and order and promising that Batista's professional murderers and torturers would be brought to public trial when the revolution triumphed, Castro prevented the outbreak of bloody and indiscriminate vengeance by relatives and friends of the victims — such as took place after the overthrow of Machado in 1933.

Not Afraid to Talk

I was in Cuba just before the State Department rang down an iron curtain to prevent U.S. citizens from going to Cuba and discovering for themselves how false a picture they have been getting of the true situation there.

I and other Americans traveled about freely and unaccompanied, talking to whomever we pleased. Although we found people opposed to the regime to be in a small minority, still we met a number of such — especially in the upper class districts of Havana. They were not at all hesitant to speak out to us in criticism of the Castro government, nor afraid to do this in Spanish in crowded buses, restaurants, etc.

People may be sent to prison for their political beliefs in this country (Smith Act) and in the Soviet Union and in a number of Latin-American countries high it the favor of our State Department, but from my observation: and inquiries this was not true in Cuba in January nor is it so now.

The Real Crime?

I imagine it could become so ii the threats of invasion, the hostile acts, the air drops to guerrillas. the assassination attempts and sabotage continue. If this comes about, I think history will place the blame not on the Castro regime but on our big corporations, the State Department and the Central Intelligence Agency (which, according to U.S. press sources, gives at least $400,000 a month to Cuban counterrevolutionaries for invasion preparations and terrorism).

So how about a little fair play for Cuba? If you can't give as friendly a press as you did to Batista's Cuba or the Perez Jiminez's Venezuela, how about waxing as wroth about Spain, Haiti, Nicaragua, Paraguay, El Salvador and other "allies" as you do about Cuba? These countries, of course, are untainted by any charges of trying to improve the living conditions of the common people at the expense of the U.S. corporations' investments. Can this be the real "crime" for which you are condemning Cuba?
 

Berta Green