William Helms: “I think I may be the only Senator now a Member of this body, or maybe one or two or three, who remembers when Edward R.…”

“I think I may be the only Senator now a Member of this body, or maybe one or two or three, who remembers when Edward R. Murrow and Herbert Matthews portrayed a young man out in the boondocks of Cuba as being a humanitarian who was ready to come into Cuba and save the Cuban people. That young man's name was Fidel Castro. Night after night, CBS repeated that fiction. Morning after morning, the New York Times repeated that fiction. And finally, Fidel Castro came in after Batista left. The first thing he did was to take up all the guns of the people who were politically opposed to him. The second thing he did was jail most of them. The third thing he did was to back the rest of them up against a wall and end their lives before a firing squad. I say all this because so much fiction has been circulated about Fidel Castro, and so much cruelty is being heaped upon the farmers of North Carolina, giving them hope that they can get financial gain from making their crops available to the people of Cuba. I wish it were so, but it is not so. The Cuban Government, as has already been discussed this afternoon, is not prepared to pay for anything. It is bankrupt. As has been said here this afternoon by two or three of the distinguished speakers, Cuba has been identified on the State Department's so-called State Sponsors of Terrorism List for very good reason.”