Excerpt from Shoot Down of U. S. Civilian Aircraft by Castro Regime: Hearing Before the Committee on International Relations, House of Representatives, One Hundred Fourth Congress, Second Session, February 29, 1996 The committee met, pursuant to notice at 10:29 a.m., in room 2172, Rayburn House Office Building, Washington, DC, Hon. Dan Burton, [chairman of the Subcommittee on the Western Hemisphere] presiding. Mr. Burton. We will start the hearing. I apologize for the delay. We are at the present time, Mr. Secretary, involved in negotiations with the State Department on the State Department Authorization Bill, and we are in Conference committee. I am supposed to be over there along with Chairman Gilman. Chairman Gilman has gone there and I am going to stay here, and he has my proxy, so I guess everything is going to work out. It is a very difficult time, so I apologize Tor the delay. We are very happy to welcome the Honorable Peter Tarn off to be our first panelist. But before we recognize him, I would like to make a statement and put into the record the statement of Chairman Gilman, who will not be able to be with us. So without objection, we will add Chairman Gilman's statement for the record. [The prepared statement of Chairman Gilman appears in the appendix.] Mr. Burton. And Representative Ackerman, who has a written statement that we will submit for the record. So without objection, those will be added. [The prepared statement of Mr. Ackerman appears in the appendix.] Mr. Burton. This hearing is tragically and eerily reminiscent of the first hearing that I chaired as chairman of the Western Hemisphere Subcommittee 1 year ago. At that time, our subcommittee convened a hearing on the deliberate sinking of the March 13th tugboat by Fidel Castro's thugs, an atrocity which took the lives of 40 innocent Cuban men, women and children. I was deeply moved by the testimony of the survivors of that tragedy and the horrible events that they described have imbedded themselves in my mind's eye. The thought of a Cuban boat pulling up alongside a tugboat when women are holding children over their heads to show that there are innocent women and children on board, and then washing them overboard with power hoses. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.