September 28, 1971

By Don Bohning

A former high ranking official in the Castro government detailed before a U.S. Senate subcommittee in Miami Monday how Cuba uses its fishing fleet for hemisphere subversion.

Roman Gonzalez-Pardo, who until late 1965 had been director of special plans for Cuba's fishing industry and Prime Minister Fidel Castro's personal representative in the island's Department of Fisheries, arrived in Miami from Mexico last June.

In his public appearance before the Senate Internal Security subcommittee, chaired by Sen. Edward Gurney (R. Fla.) in the absence of subcommittee chairman James Eastland (D., La.), Gonzalez-Pardo testified that:

• The Cuban fishing fleet has been used extensively to ship arms and men to Latin America for subversive purposes.

• The fleet has brought Latin American revolutionaries to Havana for training and indoctrination

• In early 1964 four vessels of the Cuban fishing fleet were dispatched to waters off Key West to pick up two unidentified Americans and take them to Cuba. Gonzalez-Pardo said he assumed them to be of importance because they were met by representatives of Cuban intelligence.

• Castro ordered Cuban fishing vessels to violate U.S. Territorial waters in February 1964 to deliberately provoke an incident for his own internal advantage and to detract from subversive activities elsewhere. The Cuban vessels were seized by U.S. authorities and Castro subsequently shut off the water supply to the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo on Cuba's southeast coast.

• Soviet vessels in the Caribbean were sometimes used as transfer points in smuggling arms to Latin American guerrillas. Cuban fishing vessels in the area would rendezvous with the Soviet ships and take on arms for a drop at some remote coastal point of the target country.

Gonzalez-Pardo fled Cuba by small boat in May of this year, landing near Puero Morelos on Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula.

After entering the United States illegally from Mexico in June, he created somewhat of a credibility gap in his testimony by telling U.S. Immigration when he arrived that he had crossed the Rio Grande River on a raft: telling the subcommittee early in the hearing Monday that he had waded across the river; and finally conceding, under intense questioning by subcommittee general counsel Jay Sourwine that he had crossed the border in a car after giving a $250 bribe to a Mexican official for false identification.