◆ SpookStack

Witness - In a completely deplorable state. President - Deplorable? In what way? Witness - Deplorable for a combatant,. deplorable behavior for men who came here with weapons in their hands. President - Who are you referring to? Witness - I am referring to all those who were captured here. We dedicated the 19th [of April 1961] to picking them up, not capturing them. President - Did they turn themselves in? Witness - They simply turned themselves in. You saw them and you picked them up, that's all there was to it. 4. There were some who confin~d themselves more or less to their defense, but there were others who. even at the time when only 70 or 100 members of the brigade were prisoners, spoke on television and gave data that the revolutionary [Castro] forces were able to use in effecting a speedier capture of their other buddies, whom they should have supposed were still fighting. I was not dealing only with the prisoners who admitted defeat and recognized their guilt, but those--like Mr. Artime-- who did not at that time hestitate to accuse others, including individuals in the counterrevolutionary underground here in Cuba. That is not the behavior of leaders. 22/* By the time nearly 1,200 Brigade members who had been imprisoned were returned to the United States in December 1962, Rll were heroes and none were cowards. Getting reliable in- formation about the performance of the Brigade during the three days of the invasion proved almost impossible. Both the commercial publications on the Bay of Pigs that began even before the release of the prisoners from Cuba and the most ------ *Both Manuel Artime and Jose Perez San Roman, two of the leading figures in the anti-Castro brigade, signed confessions of treason and blamed the U.S. for having conned them into joining the attempt to overthrow Castro. £l/