JFK and Castro, Half a Century Later

John F. Kennedy’s assassination in the ‘60s stirred up the hornet’s nest. Secretary of State John Kerry does not rule out that Fidel Castro or the Soviets were behind this death. He recently affirmed it in plain language. He does not believe, like half the country, the official position that Lee Harvey Oswald was a solitary madman who acted at his own risk.

Kerry is not the first high-ranking U.S. official to have this suspicion. President Lyndon Johnson, Kennedy’s successor, had the same thought. Joseph Califano, secretary of the Army at the time, agreed with his president.* Winston Scott, the chief of the CIA in Mexico, the country Oswald turned to a little before the crime to meet with Cuban and Soviet diplomats, supported something similar. They don’t dispute that Oswald fired; it was his rifle, they were his fingerprints and the ballistic tests prove it. Nearly everyone, even those with doubts, accepted that he was the only shooter, but some felt that the assassin had been directed to his target by Cuban hands (or, as CIA senior official Brian Latell suspects in his book “Castro’s Secrets: Cuban Intelligence, the CIA and the Assassination of John F. Kennedy,” Havana knew what was going to happen).

Castro had reasons to encourage Kennedy’s death. He knew that the U.S. president was trying to assassinate him. And he knew — according to Latell — because one of the suspected assassins, Commander Rolando Cubela, was a double agent. He also knew it because one of the gangsters held in Cuba had told his captors that the Mafia had been co-opted by no less than Bobby Kennedy to eliminate Fidel. The Cuban government denies its connection to the crime and circulated improbable hypotheses to serve as a smokescreen. Fidel Castro suggests that it was Lyndon Johnson. But his means of disinformation confirms that they were exiled Cubans — specifically, Herminio Díaz, an old companion of Fidel Castro’s in a violent gangster-like organization called Unión Insurreccional Revolucionaria (Revolutionary Insurrectionary Movement) from the ‘40s, and Eladio del Valle, a former Cuban congressman.

Neither of those two could defend themselves from the accusation because they have been assassinated — Herminio when he was secretly going ashore in Cuba and Del Valle apparently from a shot to the chest and a machete wound to the head. His death occurred in Miami. It was never known who carried it out, but investigations pointed to Cuban intelligence.

There are four sources that are not saying all they know. The first is the United States. Washington is keeping hundreds of pages relating to Oswald’s trip to Mexico and his relationship with Cuban services censored. Why? One theory is that the crime could have been avoided if the CIA station had correctly transmitted everything it knew about Oswald’s relationship with Castro’s team. It is hiding a terrible case of negligence.

The second is Havana, especially intelligence officer — today, general — Fabián Escalante, who apparently was in Dallas on the day of the assassination. Escalante, additionally, could clear up the (intimate?) relationship between Silvia Tirado de Durán, an employee at the Cuban consulate, and Oswald, as well as the assassin’s participation in a “Cuban” party in Mexico City, which Mexican writer Elena Garro, present at the dance, related.

The third is Moscow. Soviet intelligence knew much about Oswald. It is not logical that the USSR would have used a person with his history and character to kill a U.S. president, given that it immediately would have aroused suspicions, but it is very significant that Oswald would have been reunited with Oleg Nechiporenko, an intelligence agent who was known to be no stranger to these sinister tasks.

But perhaps the most important testimony is the Mafia’s. Why does Jack Ruby, a small-time thug, decide to execute Oswald “to spare Jacqueline Kennedy the ordeal of participating in a painful trial”?** Touching, but strange from a hardened gangster. Oswald had denied being the mastermind of the assassination and at the time everything was very confusing. Was Ruby trying to erase other traces?

When the anniversary of JFK’s death reaches 100 years, perhaps we’ll know a little more — or never.

*Editor’s Note: Joseph Califano was special assistant to the secretary and deputy secretary of defense, and was later appointed special assistant to President Johnson.

** Editor’s Note: This quotation, accurately translated, could not be verified.