An event of outstanding importance to the Free World took place in Havana on January 3 of this year. The Cuban capital was the site of what was probably the most powerful gathering of pro-Communist, anti-American forces in the history of the Western Hemisphere.

The first Tricontinental Conference of African, Asian, and Latin American Peoples, as it was called, was convened in the Hall of the Ambassadors at the once-swank Habana Libre Hotel (formerly the Havana Hilton Hotel) in Havana, Cuba. In all, there were 83 groups from countries on three continents-reportedly represented by approximately 513 delegates, 64 observers and 77 invited guests. These groups included 27 Latin American delegations.

The Soviet delegation was the lar(rest at the Conference, consisting, of 40 delegates..

Asian countries were represented by 197 delegates, while Africancountries had 150, and the 27 Latin American groups comprised 165 delegates.

Also participating in the conference were 129 foreign journalists from 35 countries, including several from the United States, and more than 100 Cuban journalists.

Salient aspects of the Conference are evidenced as follows:

*The public posture of international communism since the fictitious burial of the Communist International has been that it does not engage in subversion or violence. At the Havana Conference, all pretense of nonintervention in the affairs of other nations was dropped, and the delegates, under Moscow leadership, openly committed themselves to the overthrow by violence of all those governments which do not meet with their approval.

*The Conference established a Communist-dominated general headquarters to support, direct, intensify, and coordinate guerrilla operations in Africa, Asia, and Latin America.

*Gave communism a subversive leverage surpassing anything it has heretofore possessed. Bringing into the Conference fold militant leftist and nationalist movements from many countries (which, while themselves not Communist, share the antipathy of the Communists towards the West and towards the United States, and support the Communist-backed "wars of national liberation" .

*Havana was selected as the headquarters for international subversion and guerrilla operations, thus making a de facto situation de jure in international Communist circles.

*Immediately following the Conference, the Latin American delegations met and, after reviewing the problems of "revolutionary tactics and strategy," unanimously voted to establish a parallel regional organization, to be known as the Latin American Solidarity Organization (OLAS), with its permanent headquarters in Havana.

*Moscow elbowed the Chinese Communists out of the No. 1 position to emerge as the undisputed controlling force in the new international apparatus of subversion.

*On the ideological plane, however, Maoism emerged triumphant, as the speeches of the delegates and the resolutions of the Conference attest.

*Castro, who has heretofore sought to straddle the fence between Moscow and Peiping, has now openly alined himself with Moscow.

*The actions taken by the Conference point to the immediate and massive intensification of terrorism and guerrilla activity throughout the Americas, as well as in Asia and Africa.

*The Communists were able to get the varied leftwing and radical-nationalist participants in the conference to designate United States "imperialism" as enemy number one in every continent.

The gravity of the threat posed by the Tricontinental Conference was the subject of a recent study prepared by the Special Consultative Committee on Security of the Organization of American States at its sixth regular meeting. Its study concluded:
 

That the so-called first Afro-Asian-Latin American Peoples' Solidarity Conference constitutes a positive threat to the free peoples of the world, and, on the hemisphere level, represents the most dangerous and serious threat that international communism has yet made against the inter-American system.

It is necessary and urgent, for the purpose of adequately defending democracy: a. That the [proven] intervention of communism in the internal affairs of the American Republics be considered as aggression, since it constitutes a threat to the security of the hemisphere.

b. That the American governments define their position regarding the present treatment of every kind to be given to communism, and that they consequently adopt coordinated measures that will lead to the common goals.