Castro and the Kennedy Assassination Decades Before Oliver Stone, Cuba Saw a Conspiracy by Jon Elliston Dossier Editor pscpdocs@aol.com "This is bad news," Fidel Castro said in serious tones. He repeated himself: "This is bad news." The date was November 22, 1963, and Castro had just heard that one of his staunchest enemies had been gunned down in the streets of Dallas, Texas. John F. Kennedy was dead, and the Cuban leader was extremely worried. Given the bitter state of relations between the United States and Cuba during the Kennedy administration, Castro's mournful reaction may come as a surprise. After all, President Kennedy had authorized the CIA's disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, and ordered subsequent sabotage operations against the island. During Kennedy's three years in office, the Defense Department had drafted and practiced threatening plans for a full-scale invasion of Cuba, and the CIA had put multiple hits on Castro's life. Despite all this, Castro apparently saw nothing but disaster in the news of Kennedy's death. Newly released documents from the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) reinforce past indications that the Cuban leader reacted grimly to the assassination of the American president. The NSA's specialty is "signals intelligence" -- the global interception and collection of telephone and radio conversations. In the days after Kennedy's killing, the NSA turned its powerful electronic ears on the island of Cuba, fishing for clues about what role, if any, Castro and his cronies may have played in the assassination. In August 1997, almost 34 years after JFK's demise, the Assassination Records Review Board, a special committee appointed by Congress to facilitate the release of records on the incident, released 84 NSA documents. According to the new documents -- the first NSA records on the Kennedy assassination ever released to the public -- Castro was convinced that the forces that conspired against Kennedy were also gunning for Cuba. Some of the NSA intercepts refer to defensive measures immediately ordered by Castro: the very day Kennedy was killed, Cuban military units hit the trenches on Cuba's northern coast, in anticipation of a U.S. invasion. While his troops prepared to mount a defense of the island, Castro took to the airwaves to warn the Cuban people that dark days were ahead. In a two-hour speech broadcast on Cuban radio and television on November 23, Castro said that JFK's death "may have very negative repercussions with regard to the interests of our country." Meanwhile, a European intelligence agent cabled home this message from Havana: "Although it was only the third time I had witnessed a speech by Fidel, I got the impression that on this occasion he was frightened, if not terrified." According to the agent, whose message was monitored in secret by the NSA, Castro was concerned that the assassination might "provide the excuse which up to now was lacking to justify internationally an invasion of Cuba." These concerns were heightened by reports in the U.S. media that Kennedy's alleged assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, was a pro-Cuba activist who had led his own chapter of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee in New Orleans. From the outset, Castro charged that Oswald was only a distraction, a player in a much larger plot by powerful actors. In his November 23 speech Castro voiced the outlines of a conspiracy theory that would later become popular in the United States. In singling out Oswald, Castro charged, those actually responsible for the assassination "manufactured their criminal" to breed "anti-Cuban hysteria" in the United States. "It may be the case of an innocent person turned into a scapegoat in a well prepared plan, by people who know how to prepare such plans," Castro said. "It was hardly possible that they would not try to take advantage of circumstances to turn all their hatred, all their propaganda, and their campaign against Cuba. This did not surprise us.... We foresaw that as a result of these events the cycle might begin again, the ambush, the Machiavellian plan against our country." (In April 1978, Castro told investigators from the House Select Committee on Assassinations that it would have been "tremendous insanity" for him to plot the death of President Kennedy, because a Cuban role in the death of America's chief executive would be "the most perfect pretext for the United States to invade our country, which is what I have tried to prevent for all these years.") From the beginning Castro, and the state media outlets he essentially directed, criticized the official version of events -- that loner Lee Harvey Oswald had killed Kennedy in a fit of leftist rage -- and further charged that right-wing forces in the United States were to blame. "An event like yesterday's could only benefit those ultrarightist and ultrareactionary sectors, among which President Kennedy could not be counted," he said. One Cuban publication called the Oswald-Cuba link a "dirty maneuver aimed at making Cuba the perpetrator of the crime." An international radio broadcast from Havana said: "These events and the hysterical anticommunist campaign unleashed in the country, aimed mainly at implicating Cuba and the Soviet Union, clearly show that President Kennedy's assassination was a political crime involving the ultra-reactionary and bellicose interests of the United States which considered Mr. Kennedy's imperialist policy weak.... Macabre plans of frenzied warmongering and reaction are hiding behind these events." After Jack Ruby killed Oswald, Kennedy's alleged assassin, the Cuban leader stepped up his charges that right-wing zealots were to blame for the President's death. The plot behind the death of Kennedy, Castro asserted in a November 27 speech, was an indication of "what dangers threaten humanity, what dangers imperil the peoples, what a lack of scruples, how much evil exists, and how much cynicism is embodied in the imperialist society." Castro's sentiments were shared by one of his closest confidants, Che Guevara, who said on November 25 that the death of Kennedy "could presage more difficulties for the revolution." Guevara called Ruby's killing of Oswald "something straight out of a U.S. gangster film" and referred to "many dark and shadowy forces" at play in Dallas. Because Kennedy was gone, "the peace of the world will now be threatened for years to come," Guevara warned. A Cuban TV commentator said on November 25 said that by killing Oswald someone was probably "erasing the clues" about the true perpetrators of the assassination. Another remarked on November 27: "All signs indicate that what is involved is a slaying prepared by the most brutal forces of the United States to be used as a spark capable of setting off anticommunist and bellicose hysteria. Comrade Castro's charges and world reaction have caused their initial plans to fail. Caught in a trap, they killed Oswald, silencing him forever.... They feared a live Oswald and they cold-bloodedly eliminated him, using a gangster whom they now try to disguise as a patriot." When the new president, Lyndon Johnson, appointed the Warren Commission to look into Kennedy's assassination, the Cuban media continued their charges that a sinister cover-up was underway. A December 4 radio editorial suggested that an investigation of the CIA was in order -- "that is the most overdue investigation anyone could think of -- the investigation of the biggest crime syndicate now in operation." On the same day, another Cuban commentator remarked that CIA director Allen Dulles, who had been appointed to the Warren Commission, was "not precisely the man to have an objective view of the CIA." Did elements of the U.S. national security state participated in a plot to kill Kennedy? The question will no doubt dog assassination investigators for decades to come, but it was first voiced long ago by a man, Fidel Castro, who had considerable experience as a target of these same elements. Sources: Foreign Broadcast Information Service, "Report on Cuban Propaganda -- No. 12: Havana's Response to the Death of President Kennedy and Comment on the New Administration," December 31, 1963. George Lardner, Jr., "Castro 'Frightened' After JFK Killing," Washington Post, August 20, 1997, p. A9. Neil A. Lewis, "Documents Indicate Cuban Forces Were Put on Alert After Kennedy Assassination," @times (the New York Times on America Online), August 20, 1997. Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Robert Kennedy and His Times (Ballantine Books, 1979). (c) Copyright 1997 ParaScope, Inc. Assassination Records Collection Search Page Dossier: Covert Ops and Secret Documents Message Boards: Share your views!