Castro found it most difficult to cope, because the other two had assigned him only a secondary role. Yet in those critical days, his characteristic way of operating – which involved stressing others out through outbursts of rage, personal offence, charm, sarcasm, and hour-long speeches, until their nerves broke or they gave up exhausted – was a recipe for success that assured him at least the applause of his fellow-countrymen. The fact that he too did not shrink from playing with fire is clear from his letter of October 26, in which he hinted at a preemptive nuclear strike in the event of a US invasion of Cuba. Although he did not care to admit it, Washington’s eventual undertaking to refrain from an invasion in the future was a real achievement. But Khrushchev did perhaps miss a chance in his solo poker game with Kennedy. For we know today that, in the game-planning at the White House, even Defense Secretary Robert McNamara proposed greater concessions to the Soviet Union and hence indirectly to Cuba, such as a speedy relinquishment of the US naval base at Guantánamo.154
It was clear at the time, however, that the Americans would not be persuaded to give up other ways and means, short of an invasion, of removing Castro through covert operations and of ruining his system through an economic blockade.
The missile crisis was not only a trial of strength between the superpowers; it also revealed the vanities and characters of the main actors, and how they fought out their personal rivalries. Although branded a hothead, after his shoe-banging performance at the UN General Assembly in 1960 to gain the attention of the media, the 68-year-old Nikita Khrushchev saw himself in 1962 as having to teach the two “wild youngsters” a lesson. One of them he had condescendingly treated as an adventurer, when Castro had been preparing to overthrow Batista’s puppet regime and to deprive the “Yankees” of their sink of iniquity; the other he had disparaged as a political greenhorn, after they met in Vienna in early June 1961, a man expected to be easy game in the East–West contest. But Khrushchev had underestimated them both. In the end it was they who taught him a lesson, and this eventually contributed in 1964 to his own downfall at the hands of Leonid Brezhnev, Aleksei Kosygin, and Nikolai Podgorny.
Castro and Kennedy both came from a younger generation, being at that time 36 and 45 years old respectively. They wanted to leave behind the times of old gangsters like Batista or case-hard power politicians like Eisenhower, and to offer new social perspectives and values to the rising generation – the one as a new-style revolutionary and socialist, the other as a liberal reformer of the freedom-centered American Way of Life. Both were sons of fathers with a pioneering spirit, who had traveled a rocky road to riches and high standing and sometimes strayed from the straight and narrow. John F. Kennedy and Fidel Castro were full-blooded politicians of above-average intelligence, brilliant analysts with a sure instinct, and good speakers with a charismatic radiance. Each had to assert himself against a hostile establishment; one had been a soldier during World War II, the other had waged a war of his own.
Many years later, Castro said to Tad Szulc:
At the time Kennedy was, in my opinion, unquestionably a man full of idealism, of purpose, of youth, of enthusiasm. I do not think he was an unscrupulous man. He was, simply, … very inexperienced in politics although very intelligent, very wise, very well prepared, with magnificent personal qualities. I can speak of experience and inexperience in politics because when we Cubans compare ourselves now with what we knew then about politics … we are really ashamed of our ignorance at that time.155
Secretly more fascinated than repelled by each other, they competed in the early sixties for nothing less than a favorable judgment in world history. For Kennedy the Bay of Pigs defeat was a minus point, for Castro it was a plus; the missile crisis made Kennedy a big winner and Castro a little winner. One factor that should not be underestimated is that both men had an alter ego in their power games: their closest confidants were their younger brothers, who also played an important role behind the scenes as secret emissaries, conciliators, “sweepers,” tacticians, and strategists. Raúl Castro served as an ideological intermediary and lightning-conductor between Moscow and Havana; Robert Kennedy was the President’s buffer in dealings with the US secret service and military, as well as being responsible for secret contacts with Khrushchev via unofficial KGB channels in the Soviet embassy in Washington. Even “Daddy” Khrushchev had a “spiritual brother” in the shape of his deputy Anastas Mikoyan, who was a personal friend and a master in political survival since the days of Stalin.
For the two younger leaders, then, the significance of the one in world politics was closely bound up with the significance of the other: the Bay of Pigs and the missile crisis, the struggle for influence in Latin America and the Third World, as well as a more general ideological contest, shaped the competition of the two young heroes for the sympathies of the James Dean generation, for which they embodied the breakthrough into a new age. Kennedy, the refreshing new American president, and Castro, the victorious revolutionary, became the first political pop-idols of the sixties. It was a decade that would be marked by student protests and the Vietnam War, when, amid the Cold War rituals of the older generation, Hermann Hesse’s Steppenwolf suddenly acquired the status of cult book, flower power generated a new cult music, and Castro’s charismatic comrade-in-arms Che Guevara became Jesus Christ for the “love and peace” youth. The anti-establishment revolt was coupled with a longing for death. When Che Guevara fell in 1967 on the edge of the Bolivian jungle, the left-wing protest generation hailed him as an icon of revolutionary martyrdom. And when Kennedy was murdered in 1963, a year after the missile crisis, he became myth, legend, and model for a liberal, tolerant America.
The mutual attraction among these opposing figures of world politics is also evident in the conciliatory gestures that they made to one another in the course of 1963. First, Khrushchev stood Castro a triumphant 40-day trip around the Soviet Union and lavished on him generous economic aid. Then, in June, Kennedy offered Khrushchev the hand of reconciliation, when he gave a speech to graduates of the American University calling upon US citizens to take a fresh look at relations with the Soviet Union. “No government or social system is so evil,” he said, “that its people must be considered as lacking in virtue.”156 Khrushchev reacted enthusiastically, describing the speech as the best by an American president since Roosevelt. Shortly afterwards, the two countries signed an agreement halting nuclear tests in the atmosphere. And, so that the world should never again teeter on the brink of nuclear war, a direct telephone link was established between the Kremlin and the White House: the famous “hot line.”
At the same time, Castro and Kennedy also drew closer to each other. As we can see from secret documents first made available only in the late 1990s, contact between Havana and Washington resumed behind the scenes in January 1963, despite the Cold War rhetoric and covert CIA operations. The United States sounded out the possibility of a modus vivendi similar to that which existed with Communist Eastern Europe.157 What the Americans would have liked most, according to a position paper by security adviser McGeorge Bundy in April 1963, was that Castro should take his distance from Moscow in rather the same way that Tito had done in Yugoslavia.158 In such an event, the White House could envisage the lifting of the economic embargo and the resumption of diplomatic relations. So as not to alienate Castro in advance by making unrealistic demands, Kennedy even decided that the breaking of Cuba’s ties with the Soviet Union and China would no longer be a prerequisite for American–Cuban dialogue.
The discreet contacts were pursued on several tracks: through the New York lawyer James Donovan, who in late 1962 had negotiated the release of the Bay of Pigs mercenaries for the United States; through the popular reporter for ABC television, Lisa Howard, to whom Castro gave a long interview in April and expressed an interest in the improvement of US–Cuban relations; and through the former journalist and American ambassador to the UN, William Attwood. Castro’s representatives were his personal physician and adviser René Vallejo
and the Cuban ambassador to the UN, Carlos Lechuga. Whereas Castro repeatedly involved himself in the feelers, Kennedy was content to leave the action to his brother Robert, security adviser McGeorge Bundy and his deputy Gordon Chase, special adviser Schlesinger, and UN ambassador Stevenson. Also there in the background was the CIA, whose head, John McCone, started making difficulties in May 1963, on the grounds that such a policy would cut against the CIA’s anti-Castro operations. In September, however, the contacts were resumed, and by early November Attwood could report that Castro was “unhappy about his present dependence on the Soviet bloc,” and that “he would like to establish some official contact with the US, even though this would not be welcomed by most of his hard-core Communist entourage, such as Che Guevara.”159
When Jean Daniel, a journalist from the French news weekly L’Express, traveled to Washington for an interview in late October, with the intention of flying on to Havana, Kennedy gave him an oral message for Castro in which he raised the prospect of lifting the embargo if Castro stopped supporting guerrilla groups in Latin America. But Daniel was unable to hand on Castro’s reply. After a first meeting on November 19, the two men went together with Vallejo to the Cuban leader’s house on the beach at Varadero, where the telephone rang for Castro around midday. At the other end of the line was the country’s president, Osvaldo Dorticós. “What? Assassination?” Daniel heard his host ask, visibly disconcerted. Everyone gathered around the radio, and shortly afterwards it was reported that Kennedy was dead. When the American national anthem was then broadcast, Castro and his guests stood up and silently remembered the Cubans’ arch enemy. “Everything is going to change,” he told Daniel. “This is a serious matter, an extremely serious matter.” Castro rightly suspected that attempts would be made to blame him for the assassination. After all, as recently as September 7 of that year, in an interview at the Brazilian embassy in Havana against the background of CIA covert operations against his own person, he had warned: “United States leaders should think that if they are aiding terrorist plans to eliminate Cuban leaders, they themselves will not be safe.”160 And had not Lee Harvey Oswald, the suspected assassin, been a member of a committee called “Fair Play for Cuba”? When serving in the Marines, he had been trained as a radar specialist in California and at an air base in Japan, and he spoke Russian. He had defected to the Soviet Union in October 1959 and married a Russian woman. Yet in 1962 he had returned to the United States, without being arrested and prosecuted for desertion, and had even had no difficulty obtaining a new passport. The milieu in which he had moved before Kennedy’s murder had probably been made up of CIA, Mafia, and militant Cuban exiles.
When the first attempts were made to link Cuba with Oswald and the Kennedy assassination, Castro got his administrative departments to make some investigations of their own. He told Nicaraguan writer and former interior minister Tomás Borge:
We discovered that an individual of that name and answering to that description had presented himself at our embassy in Mexico and asked for a visa to come to Cuba – I think it was a temporary visa, en route to the Soviet Union. Our personnel turned down his application.… I wonder why Oswald wanted to come to Cuba.… What would have happened if he had come to Cuba, gone on to the Soviet Union, returned to the United States and killed Kennedy?161
Later it turned out that he had been an Oswald double groomed by the CIA, who, on returning to the United States, apparently met bar-owner Jack Ruby, the man who would shoot Oswald at a Dallas police station after the Kennedy assassination. In the same conversation with Borge, Castro expressed his own doubts about the official verdict that Oswald had been a lone assassin.
I have a lot of experience using telescopic sights, because I trained those who came on board the Granma [in 1956].… It seemed extremely difficult – almost impossible – for anyone to fire so many shots at a moving target in such a short time – and do so with such precision that Kennedy was seriously injured three times.… When you use a telescopic sight, you have to bring the next bullet up into the breech of the rifle again and get the target back in your sights after you’ve fired the first shot. It isn’t easy, and it takes time.162
In the endless speculation about the possible motives and instigators behind the Kennedy assassination, one finds again and again the names of people from circles that wanted Castro dead: the Mafiosi Johnny Roselli and Santos Trafficante (who later killed Roselli), and interlinked figures from CIA and Cuban exile milieux with some connection to Jack Ruby (who, well before the revolution, had had business links with Trafficante and the Cuba-based Mafia). Even Castro’s German ex-girlfriend, Marita Lorenz, comes into the picture, for she later claimed before the Warren Commission and in her memoirs that her CIA friend, Frank Sturgis, who once talked her into the botulism attempt on Castro’s life, had been mixed up in the Kennedy assassination.163 Apparently she even heard some of the planning at the house of Cuban exile Orlando Bosch, in Miami. (Bosch later featured as the man behind a bomb attack on a Cuban transport plane, in which 76 people were killed off Barbados in October 1976. Owing to his CIA connections, he went unpunished under the CIA boss of the time and later US President George Bush, and a few years later, according to Hinckle and Turner, found a friend in George Bush’s son Jeb (brother of George W. Bush), who served as governor of Florida in the late 1990s and scraped home in the presidential elections of the year 2000.164)
A few days before the deadly bullets hit Kennedy, Marita Lorenz, Sturgis, and others, posing as members of a hunting club, drove two cars packed with guns to Dallas and put up at a motel there. It seems that among the group were Castro’s renegade pilot, Pedro Díaz Lanz, and an inconspicuous man they called “Ozzie.” Marita Lorenz, who had meanwhile followed a combat course with 5,000 men at a Cuban exile camp, says that she met him on other exercises and took a dislike to him; she used to joke that the slightly built man could barely hold up a rifle. This “Ozzie” was in fact Lee Harvey Oswald. During the night, she claims, two men commanding the others’ respect made a brief appearance, one of whom she later identified as CIA agent Howard Hunt, who had been in charge of planning for the Bay of Pigs landing. Hunt handed over a thick envelope filled with money. The other man was a gangster type, who told Sturgis to send her out. She later identified him as Jack Ruby.
The theory that Bay of Pigs veterans from the Cuban exile community and the CIA were behind the assassination is based on the fact that they felt Kennedy had betrayed them and left them in the lurch. For Lyndon B. Johnson, however, Kennedy’s vice-president and successor, the man behind the shooting was to be found in Havana. It had been a shoot-out as in the days of the Wild West: “Well, Kennedy tried to get Fidel Castro,” he said in a TV interview, “but Fidel Castro got Kennedy first.”165 At the time, there were also other conspiracy theories that featured Johnson in a prominent role. Kennedy’s opponent in the presidential contest, Richard Nixon, who happened to have been in Dallas shortly before, speculated that Kennedy had wanted to drop Johnson as vice-president before the next elections.
A macabre footnote is that on the fateful afternoon of November 22, a CIA agent in Paris was handing over a specially prepared pen to Rolando Cubela, alias AM/LASH, the man the CIA had hired to kill Castro. The ballpoint, which was never actually used, contained a poison needle that would immediately kill its victim after the tiniest scratch.166 At one point during their meeting, the telephone rang and the CIA agent was told by a Paris-based colleague that the President had just been shot.167
CIA agent Frank Sturgis was left untouched despite his clear links with Oswald, and some years later he even had the chance to make a name for himself by playing a major role in the undercover war against Castro. In June 1972, in fact, he was caught during the break-in at the Democratic Party’s election headquarters in Washington, the famous Watergate complex. His accomplices, and even some of the men behind the operation, were part of Sturgis’s old Cuba connection: Bernard Barker, a Havana-born American who had worked for Batista’s noto
rious SIM police; Rolando Eugenio Martínez, the FBI’s contact man in Cuba; two other CIA veterans, Félix Rodríguez and Rafael Quintero; and even Howard Hunt, the Bay of Pigs coordinator, man in charge of Cuban exile agents and – according to Marita Lorenz – a night-time deliverer of funds at a Dallas motel just before Kennedy’s assassination. At the time of Watergate, Hunt was actually a White House adviser. The burglars brazenly maintained that they had been looking for evidence of Castro’s financial support for the Democratic presidential candidate, George McGovern.
Let us recall. Immediately after the shooting of Kennedy, the names of Sturgis and Hunt, as well as other figures from the milieu of the CIA, organized crime and the Cuban emigration, were already repeatedly linked with the circle of acquaintances of Lee Harvey Oswald, the supposed assassin, and even with the assassination itself. And yet, in the report it issued in 1964, the Commission set up to investigate the assassination, named after its chairman Senator Earl Warren, stood by the version that Oswald had acted alone. Doubts about the Commission were fueled by the fact that one of its members was Kennedy’s sworn enemy, Allen Dulles, who had been sacked not long before as head of the CIA. Only at the end of the 1970s did a Senate Commission under Senator Frank Church (the Church Commission) accept the possibility that there had been a conspiracy to murder the President.
The only man who ever got a court to concern itself officially with the Kennedy case was former New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison. In 1966 he began secret investigations, because Oswald’s milieu of CIA and FBI agents and militant Cuban exiles operated mainly in New Orleans and had strange links that the Warren Commission never considered. Soon Garrison found that higher authorities and affected institutions such as the CIA and FBI were crudely hindering his investigations; attempts were made to blacken his name, and there were mysterious murders or deaths of potential witnesses. In the end, however, his application for an official judicial inquiry into Kennedy’s assassination was turned down. He thought at the time: “The group around Operation Mongoose seems to have been the center of the JFK conspiracy.”168 Since no official legal body would touch the rather remarkable findings of Garrison’s research, Hollywood director Oliver Stone took them up in his feature film of the nineties, FK.
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