Cuba behind JFK murder, claims film

CUBA lay behind the 1963 assassination of President John F Kennedy by Lee Harvey Oswald and its agents provided the gunman with money and support, an award-winning German director has claimed in a new documentary film.

Wilfried Huismann spent three years researching Rendezvous with Death, based on interviews with former Cuban secret agents, US officials and a Russian intelligence source, and on research in Mexican security archives.

The film, shown to journalists in Berlin on Wednesday, says Oswald travelled to Mexico City by bus in September 1963, seven weeks before the Kennedy shooting, and met agents at the Cuban embassy there who paid him $6,500.

Oscar Marino, a former Cuban agent and a key source for the documentary, told Mr Huismann that Oswald himself had volunteered for the assassination mission and Havana had exploited him.

“Oswald was a dissident. He hated his country ... Oswald offered to kill Kennedy,” Mr Marino said in the film.

“He was so full of hate, he had the idea. We used him ... He was a tool.”

He said he knew with certainty that the assassination was an operation of the Cuban secret service G-2, but would not say if it was ordered by President Fidel Castro.

Oswald was shot dead by Jack Ruby two days after killing Mr Kennedy in Dallas on November 22, 1963.

The film argues Cuba wanted to eliminate Kennedy as the chief enemy of its Communist revolution, and portrays him and Mr Castro as duelling opponents each trying to assassinate the other first.

Former CIA official Sam Halpern told Mr Huismann: “He [Castro] beat us. He bested us. He came out on top, and we lost.”

Laurence Keenan, an officer of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) who was sent to Mexico City immediately after Kennedy’s death to investigate a possible Cuban connection, said he was recalled after just three days and the probe was aborted.

“This was perhaps the worst investigation the FBI was ever involved in,” Mr Keenan said. “I realised that I was used. I felt ashamed. We missed a moment in history.”

Mr Keenan, 81, said he was convinced Kennedy’s successor, Lyndon Johnson, blocked further investigation because proof of a Cuban link would put him under irresistible pressure to invade the island, a year after the Cuban missile crisis had brought the US and Soviet Union to the brink of nuclear war.

“Most likely there would have been an invasion of Cuba which could have had unknown consequences for the whole world,” he told journalists at the screening.

Mr Huismann also unearthed a US intelligence report shown to Johnson which said Cuban secret service chief Fabian Escalante flew via Mexico City to Dallas on the day of Mr Kennedy’s assassination, and back the same day.

Tracked down by the film maker, Mr Escalante denied he had been in Dallas.