Reclaiming History

by Vincent Bugliosi

  In a two-hour radio and television address to his people on the evening following the assassination, the Cuban leader said that the assassination of Kennedy was “grave and bad news…from the political point of view” because it could change U.S. foreign policy “from bad to worse.”32 And it wasn’t just Castro who felt this way. An NSA intercept picked up a message on November 27, 1963 (just four days after the assassination), from the Brazilian ambassador to Cuba to his foreign office, stating that Cuban officials “were unanimous in believing that any other president would be even worse” than Kennedy.33

  Perhaps the most direct accusation that Castro was behind Kennedy’s death came from someone whose story was so lacking in credibility that a member of the HSCA, during open proceedings, accused the accuser of blatant perjury.

  On May 1, 1961, Antulio Ramirez Ortiz, a U.S. citizen of Puerto Rican origin, boarded a National Airlines flight out of Miami destined for Key West and, using a knife and a gun, hijacked the plane to Cuba. In testimony before the HSCA, Ramirez said that once the plane landed in Havana, Cuba’s secret service police took him to their headquarters but didn’t bother to question him for three or four months. (He claimed that in 1959 he had delivered a phony message for the Cuban secret service to the Dominican Republican consulate in New York City, so Havana knew him.) During that period, he lived at the headquarters and worked in the kitchen. He said a female coworker told him one day that in the room where the secret service stored its files, she had seen a file on him with photos in it. Why she would be looking through those secret files and have access to them he did not know. Out of curiosity, one day he walked into the room (apparently the Cuban secret police had no security and even kitchen employees could peruse their files) and while looking for his file he noticed one labeled “Oswald-Kennedy.” Looking inside, he saw a photo of Oswald and a report written in Russian, in which, he testified, Oswald’s wife was described as “belonging to the Soviet secret police,” and he told the HSCA that “the Russian secret police were recommending this person [Oswald] to the Cuban government.” One big problem is that when HSCA counsel asked Ramirez if he was able to “read Russian,” Ramirez answered, “No,” adding he could recognize some of the Russian characters, however.

  But Ramirez’s story gets, as Lewis Carroll said, “curiouser and curiouser,” or, more aptly, sillier and sillier. Ramirez said that from the moment he landed in Havana, the Cuban secret service “thought I was working for the CIA.” Yet not only did the secret service police apparently allow him free run of their headquarters in 1961, but after they arrested him for espionage in September of 1963, instead of imprisoning him, they merely “detained” him for a month. The following month they freed him on condition that he would start working for them. Though he was drawing a “full salary” and they were paying his hotel expenses, when HSCA counsel asked what he was doing in return for this, he replied, “Absolutely nothing.” But wait. The Cuban secret service at least had something important they wanted to share with him. One of the Cuban secret service agents named Martin (Ramirez didn’t know his last name) confided in him over drinks at the Hotel Saratoga in Havana in early November of 1963 that the Cubans intended to kill Kennedy “in this very month of November. Read the papers.”

  With the exception of a brief period when he was hospitalized in a mental institution and received psychiatric care, Ramirez continued to float around Havana, leaving in 1975 for the United States. When asked by HSCA counsel how the Cuban government allowed him to leave knowing he possessed information that it had Kennedy killed, Ramirez responded, “Because I had something more valuable than all that. If I were dead, they would have a problem,” though he didn’t elaborate on this. In other words, the Cubans didn’t think they’d have much of a problem if they killed the president of the United States, but thought they’d have real problems killing Ramirez. You don’t say.

  When Ramirez arrived in Miami in 1975, the FBI arrested him. He said he never told the FBI what he knew because he was saving the material for a book he intended to write about his experiences. (The five-hundred-page manuscript he eventually wrote, titled “Castro’s Red Hot Hell,” was never published.) After being convicted of hijacking the National Airlines plane, Ramirez was sentenced to twenty years and sent to the federal penitentiary at McNeil Island in Washington State. In April of 1978, he contacted the HSCA with a plan to capture Kennedy’s killers. What Ramirez wanted was to be let out of prison and “set up in a nice cozy place, easy to watch from a distance. If possible, in a not too populated area of California, close to the beach.” From there, he said, he could lure Cuban agent Martin and other fellow agents to where he was for the purpose of killing him (you see, they couldn’t kill him in Cuba, they had to sneak into this country to do so) at which time they could be arrested by the FBI.

  Needless to say, the HSCA did not go along with the ludicrous Ramirez. The acting HSCA chairman, Congressman Floyd Fithian, told Ramirez, “I believe you have been lying to me. I believe you have not told the truth…Frankly, I have lost patience with you…and I do not want a continuation of [your] cock and bull story before this committee of the Congress.”34

  The HSCA found that some of Ramirez’s allegations, such as the identities of Cuban officials he named, could be corroborated, but said that “the essential aspects of his allegations were incredible,” and hence, rejected his story.35

  Yet another preposterous allegation that Castro ordered Kennedy’s death came from one Pascual Enrique Ruedolo Gongora, a fifty-year-old Cuban living in New York City who wanted to be deported back to Cuba. Shortly after the assassination, he told Gregory Banon, the Spanish consul in New York City, that he was in one of five or six groups that Castro sent to the United States to assassinate President Kennedy. There was one problem with Gongora’s story, in addition to the complete implausibility of it. Gongora, who had been living in a twelve-dollar-per-week apartment paid by New York City’s Department of Welfare from October 4 to November 28, 1963, when he was deported back to Cuba via Madrid, happened to be crazy, severely so. In an October 18, 1963, letter to Robert Kennedy from New York City, Gongora wrote, “I feel very ill,” and added that he needed to be deported because a particular heroin trafficker who was being protected by the U.S. government was out to harm him, and in Cuba he (the trafficker) “even set set dogs on women…Eighteen thousand women [were] killed by dogs for the pleasure of sadistic neurotics, scoundrels and vice addicts.” After Gongora returned to Cuba in late November of 1963, he somehow managed to return to the United States (Castro apparently wasn’t interested in silencing one of the “talking” killers he sent to assassinate Kennedy), where he was admitted to Bellevue Psychiatric Hospital in New York City and diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic. Gongora, who had been arrested on two narcotic charges in the United States, admitted to past psychiatric care in Cuba.36

  The search for any thread or whisper of a conspiracy in the Kennedy assassination has been endless. One such whisper, which, if true, conspiracy theorists thought connected Castro with the events in Dealey Plaza, was an allegation that first surfaced in the 1976 Church Committee Report. The CIA received information from some unidentified source that on the night of the assassination a Cubana Airlines flight from Mexico City (not Dallas, mind you) to Cuba was delayed some five hours, from 6:00 to 11:00 p.m. EST, awaiting an unidentified passenger. This passenger reportedly arrived at the airport in a twin-engine aircraft at 10:30 p.m. and boarded the Cubana Airlines plane without passing through customs, where he would have needed to show his passport. He traveled in the cockpit, the source said, thereby avoiding identification by the passengers.37 The HSCA investigated the matter and found that the Cubana flight departed for Havana at 8:30 p.m., two hours before the arrival of the private aircraft carrying the mysterious passenger, so he could not have taken the subject flight.38 So much for the Cubana Airlines mysterious passenger rumor, or so one would think.

  Author Henry Hurt asserts that “the mystery passenger is beli
eved to have been one Miguel Casas Saez.” He quotes CIA documents released under the Freedom of Information Act which say that Casas’s aunt in Remedios, Las Villas, Cuba, told a source (her dentist) that Casas was in Dallas on the day of the assassination and returned to Cuba that day on “a…plane” from “Mexico,” that he was one of Raul Castro’s men, and “very brave.” Another Cuban source said Casas had left Remedios for the United States on a “sabotage and espionage mission,” and two other sources said that Casas was a “poor person” and “poorly dressed” before he disappeared from Remedios for several weeks (though not stated, supposedly in the fall of 1963), but upon returning had “much money,” and owned “large amounts of T-shirts, jackets and shoes, all American made.” (Hurt doesn’t tell his readers that another source from the same CIA documents he quotes from said that Casas, who left Cuba for the United States on September 26, 1963, on a small boat, was caught in a hurricane and ended up in Puerto Rico temporarily, came back from the states, and was seen in Remedios on November 18, 1963, four days before the assassination.) None of the sources in the CIA documents connect Casas in any way with the assassination, or even allege such a connection. But from this, Hurt, trying to establish a Castro connection to the assassination, remarkably and amusingly concludes that Casas was the Cubana Airlines mystery passenger—that is, the passenger who we know could not have existed, or the passenger who really did exist and had the supernatural power to be in two places at the same time, taking off from Mexico City to Havana at 8:30 p.m. on November 22, 1963, even though he did not arrive at the Mexico City airport until 10:30 p.m.39

  Fidel Castro told several members of the HSCA during their visit with him in Havana on April 3, 1978, something that is almost too obvious (to rational people, that is) to state:

  Who here could have operated and planned something so delicate as the death of the United States president? That [is] insane. From the ideological point of view, it [would be] insane. And from the political point of view, it [would be] a tremendous insanity. I am going to tell you here that nobody, nobody ever had the idea of such things…Anyone who subscribed to that idea would have been judged insane, absolutely sick. Never, in twenty years of revolution, I never heard anyone suggest nor even speculate about a measure of that sort, because who could think about the idea of organizing the death of the president of the United States? That would have been the most perfect pretext for the United States to invade our country, which is what I have tried to prevent for all these years, in every possible sense. Since the United States is much more powerful than we are, what could we gain by a war with the United States? The United States would lose nothing. The destruction would have been here.40

  Former CIA director Richard Helms said that if the United States had learned that Castro had Kennedy killed, “We would have bombed Cuba back into the Middle Ages.”41

  Along these lines, and as indicated earlier, NSA documents of eavesdropping intercepts released by the ARRB on August 19, 1997, revealed that immediately after the assassination, an “emotional and uneasy” Fidel Castro mobilized his armed forces out of fear the United States would blame him for Kennedy’s murder and launch an invasion in retaliation.42 One intercept of a cable sent from a foreign ambassador in Havana back home contained these words: “I got the immediate impression that Castro was frightened, if not terrified.”43

  In Castro’s statement to the HSCA, he could have added that even if he had been insane enough to try and kill Kennedy, since there’s normally an “internal logic” within the realm of insanity, why would he select as his triggerman someone like Oswald who was a known Castro sympathizer? This would only increase the suspicion that it was he who was behind the assassination. Say what you want about Castro’s politics, but no one has ever accused him of being simpleminded. To the contrary, he is regarded by virtually everyone to be a highly intelligent and pragmatic person.

  With respect to Castro’s intelligence and pragmatism, Frank Mankiewicz, who was RFK’s press secretary, and spent many hours in Havana interviewing Castro for a book he coauthored in 1975, With Fidel, said he was “very impressed” with Castro, that he was “smart as hell, enormously well-read and very eloquent.” Indeed, Mankiewicz, who has met several world leaders, said, “It’s unfortunate Castro grew up in Cuba, where the highest office he could achieve was the head of Cuba. Wherever he was, like a nation in Europe, he absolutely would have been a leader.” Mankiewicz laughed off the notion that Castro would have tried to kill Kennedy. “He is an ultimate survivor, and when it comes to anything that would jeopardize his security, he was quite conservative and careful.” About Castro’s legendary charisma, he said Castro “would suck up all the oxygen in the room” when he entered. Mankiewicz gave an example of Castro’s well-honed sense of humor (which itself requires intelligence). “When I asked him why he was so popular with the Cuban people, Castro [who is well over six feet tall] said, ‘It helps if you are 6 inches taller than anyone else in the country.’”44

  Before we go on, there is another source whom some conspiracy theorists rely on for the idea that Castro had JFK killed, and it is none other than JFK’s brother RFK. As previously noted, Bobby Kennedy believed that if there had been a conspiracy to murder JFK, he, Bobby, may have been responsible because the murder may have been in retaliation for the aggressive and unrelenting war he waged against organized crime and Castro. In one of his heavily quoted post-assassination remarks, he told Bill Moyers in the spring of 1968, “I have…wondered at times if we did not pay a very great price for being more energetic than wise about a lot of things, especially Cuba.”45 This, of course, was just speculative rumination on RFK’s part, and all the available credible evidence shows that neither Cuba (Castro) nor organized crime was behind JFK’s death. But in a sense (a sense that he probably was not alluding to in his remark), his speculation was probably accurate. Though we can rest assured Castro did not have Oswald kill Kennedy, we have seen in considerable detail in the Oswald biography in this book that JFK and RFK’s war against Castro’s Cuba almost for certain played some role in Oswald’s decision to kill the president.

  One argument used by anti-conspiracy people against Castro’s complicity, the merit of which is unclear, is based on the fact that in the fall of 1963, as Richard Goodwin, White House assistant to Kennedy, wrote, “Kennedy dispatched an emissary [William Attwood, a special adviser to the American delegation to the United Nations] to talk with the Cuban delegate to the United Nations in hopes of laying the groundwork for some rapprochement.”46 Though the HSCA, in 1978, confirmed this,47 there is no question that right up to the day of the assassination, Cuban-American relations were raw, bitter, and volatile. Indeed, on November 18, 1963, just days before the assassination, Kennedy, in a major foreign policy speech before the Inter-American Press Association in Miami Beach, Florida, all but invited the Cuban people to overthrow Castro’s Communist regime and promised prompt U.S. aid if they did.48

  But that very same day, November 18, Attwood called Havana and spoke by phone with a member of Castro’s staff, believed to be Major Rene Vallejo. Pursuant to White House instructions, Attwood informed Castro’s staff member what he had previously told Carlos Lechuga, Cuba’s ambassador to the United Nations, on September 23, 1963, in New York City—that the United States favored preliminary negotiations with Cuba on the issue of accommodation between the two countries at the United Nations (rather than Cuba, as the Cubans wanted), and that the United States desired to work out an agenda for these talks.49

  In addition, the French journalist who had a series of interviews with Castro during the week leading up to and including the assassination, Jean Daniel, said that at his meeting with Castro in Havana the following day, November 19, Castro, right after a relentless indictment of U.S. policy toward Cuba for the CIA’s training, equipping, and organizing of Cuban exiles for a counterrevolution, suddenly took a less hostile position. He quotes Castro as saying, “Kennedy could still be the man” who could perhaps understand t
he explosive realities of Cuba and meet them halfway. “He [Kennedy] still has the possibility of becoming in the eyes of history the greatest President of the United States, the leader who may at last understand that there can be co-existence between capitalists and socialists…I know, for example, that for Khrushchev, Kennedy is a man you can talk with. I have gotten this impression from all my conversations with Khrushchev. Other leaders have assured me that to attain this goal, we must first await his re-election. Personally, I consider him responsible for everything, but I will say this: He has come to understand many things over the past few months; and then too, in the last analysis, I’m convinced that anyone else would be worse…If you see him again [Daniel had interviewed the president on October 24], you can tell him that I’m willing to declare Goldwater my friend if that will guarantee [his] re-election.”50*

  Castro, it appears, had (as is so common in human relations) ambivalent, schizophrenic feelings about Kennedy. Journalist Frank Mankiewicz and the coauthor of his book on Castro, Kirby Jones, had several recorded conversations with Castro during three visits to Cuba in 1974 and 1975. In one conversation, while Castro spoke of Kennedy’s responsibility for approving (though, Castro believed, not enthusiastically) the already existing plans to invade Cuba (which Castro said originated with Vice President Nixon during the Eisenhower administration), and saying he was already responsible for other acts “of aggression” toward Cuba which prevented him from being called a friend of Cuba, he nonetheless had some good things to say about Kennedy. Referring to Kennedy as an “intelligent” and “brilliant man,” he felt his most affirmative virtue was that “he was a courageous man,” a man (unlike Lyndon Johnson, he said) who was “capable of revising a policy because he had the courage to do so,” and Castro had “interpreted” the Jean Daniel visit “as a definite gesture on Kennedy’s part” toward detente. “I have no doubts,” Castro said, “that Kennedy would someday have reconsidered his policy towards Cuba.” Castro went on to say that although he and his people “must take into consideration [Kennedy’s] responsibility for measures that were taken against us, we did not hold personal grudges against him, nor did we have reason to wish for his death, and least of all the tragic death he suffered. I say this in all honesty, in all sincerity, that we were grieved, it was very unpleasant to learn of his death, and we would have preferred that he continue in the presidency of the United States.”51