Former Aide to Guevara Criticizes 'Police State'

The former deputy of Che Guevara, Cuba's Minister of Finance, told a small audience last night that Cuba has become, especially in the last 70 days, "one of the most horrible police states in history," and that Russia is using the country as a tool to dominate South America.

Speaking at Harkness Commons, Henrique Menocal, who fled the Castro regime currently, told how Castro had urged Cubans to create "citizens' committees" on each street to get detailed information on each other's private lives.

He told how a boy who denounced his mother as an enemy of the revolution had been awarded a prize on television. At every stage of the revolution, Menocal said, he kept hoping for a return to its original ideals, never thinking that "someone with such ideals as Castro had could go so low."

Nor has improvement of material conditions compensated for the loss of individual rights, Menocal said. Even those who have obtained land from the distribution stogram go hungry, he declared, adding that, "a Cadillac is no good without food to go with it."

Russian Prepaganda

Menocal added an anecdote illustrating Cubu's role as a "Communist tool." Castro told him to send 12,000 tons of sugar to Chile after the earthquake there, he said, but he found that "for every bag of sugar the ships were being loaded with a bag of Russian propaganda."

Of the Cuban commercial attaches scattered throughout the Latin American area, Menocal declared, "there is not one that is not a proven member of the Communist Party."

Menocal, who will participate in a 20th Century Week panel tomorrow night, concluded with an appeal to other South American nations "to take note of how revolutions can so easily turn to tragedy."

Two other Latin Americans were on the platform with Menocal: Horacio Godoy, professor of law at the University of La Platte in Argentina, and Raul Garcia Amador, a Cuban professor.

Godoy declared that after a year and a half in the United States he had found "a real balance of ignorance" between North and South America, for few people in either area are aware of the conditions in countries of the other.

Speaking last, Amador differed with an assertion by Godoy that the Cuban problem is so complex that judgments on it are difficult. Quite clearly to all in the U.S., he said, the situation is simply one of invasion, both physically, with arms and money, and ideologically, by Russia.