Grok responds to the query: "What evidence from the newly released JFK files suggests that Cuba may have been involved in the assassination?"

https://grok.com/share/bGVnYWN5_ce3e022c-33f5-43d6-aa66-b34b3edd0339

 The newly released JFK files from March 18, 2025, provide several pieces of evidence and context that suggest a possible Cuban involvement in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, though the information is often circumstantial, speculative, or deliberately obscured by the CIA and other U.S. officials. Let’s break this down based on the documents provided, while also critically examining the narrative and highlighting surprising elements that challenge the official story of Lee Harvey Oswald acting alone.

Evidence Suggesting Cuban Involvement

1. CIA Evidence of Cuban Retaliation
   The document 157-10014-10242 reveals that after JFK’s assassination on November 22, 1963, the CIA received evidence suggesting that Cuban Premier Fidel Castro may have orchestrated the killing as retaliation for CIA attempts on his life. This is a significant claim because it directly implicates Castro, and the CIA’s possession of such evidence immediately after the assassination raises questions about why this wasn’t thoroughly investigated or shared with the Warren Commission. The document notes that the CIA withheld this information for two reasons: to conceal their own recruitment of Mafia mobsters to assassinate Castro and to prevent public outrage that might lead to "reckless actions." This cover-up suggests that the CIA believed the evidence was credible enough to warrant suppression, which indirectly lends weight to the possibility of Cuban involvement.
2. Oswald’s Visit to the Cuban Embassy
   In the same file 157-10014-10242, Fidel Castro, in an interview with Frank Mankiewicz and Kirby Jones, notes that Lee Harvey Oswald visited the Cuban embassy in Mexico City a few months prior to the assassination to obtain a travel permit to Cuba, which was denied. Castro speculates that Oswald’s actions might have been an attempt to implicate Cuba, suggesting a broader conspiracy by U.S. reactionaries. While Castro denies involvement, the fact of Oswald’s visit to the Cuban embassy is a concrete link between the assassin and Cuba. This raises the possibility that Oswald may have been influenced, manipulated, or even directed by Cuban agents—or that someone wanted it to appear that way. The timing of the visit, just months before the assassination, is suspicious and suggests a potential Cuban connection, even if it was staged to frame Cuba.
3. Immediate Post-Assassination Intelligence from Mexico City
   The file 157-10014-10242 also states that within hours of JFK’s death, the U.S. embassy in Mexico City cabled information suggesting Cuban involvement, which was corroborated by CIA findings in Washington. This rapid emergence of intelligence pointing to Cuba is striking. While CIA Director John A. McCone claimed that Castro’s name was not mentioned during his three-hour meeting with Robert F. Kennedy immediately after the shooting, the next day McCone briefed President Lyndon B. Johnson on the Mexico City intelligence. The fact that this information was not shared with the Warren Commission further fuels suspicion. If the intelligence was baseless, why was it withheld? The suppression suggests that U.S. officials may have believed there was a real Cuban link but chose to bury it to avoid escalating tensions during the Cold War.
4. The AM/LASH Operation and Timing
   Another document, also 157-10014-10242, notes that at the very hour JFK was shot, a former Castro supporter, code-named AM/LASH (identified as Rolando Cuebala, now imprisoned in Cuba), was receiving a poison pen from a CIA agent as part of an ongoing anti-Castro effort. This timing is extraordinary and suggests a possible connection. If Cuban intelligence was aware of the CIA’s continued assassination attempts against Castro—such as this one involving AM/LASH—they might have had a motive to retaliate. The simultaneity of JFK’s assassination and the AM/LASH operation could indicate that Cuba, anticipating further attempts on Castro’s life, decided to strike first. Alternatively, it might suggest that elements within the CIA or anti-Castro groups orchestrated JFK’s death to make it look like Cuban retaliation, knowing the AM/LASH operation could be used to point fingers at Castro.
5. Cuban Financing of Subversive Activities in Latin America
   Documents 177-10002-10016 and 176-10036-10065 detail Cuban financing of subversive operations across Latin America, including in Venezuela, Nicaragua, Ecuador, Guatemala, and Brazil, during 1961–1963. These operations involved cash couriers, bank transfers, and diplomatic channels to fund guerrilla activities, often with ties to Communist groups. For example, in Brazil, a guerrilla trained in Cuba was caught with ammunition funded by Communist China via Cuba, showing Cuba’s role as a conduit for revolutionary activities. While these documents don’t directly link Cuba to JFK’s assassination, they establish a pattern of Cuban support for subversive and violent operations in the Western Hemisphere during the same period. This context makes it plausible that Cuba could have extended its operations to target a high-profile figure like JFK, especially given the CIA’s repeated attempts to kill Castro.

Surprising Information and Critical Analysis

• CIA-Mafia Collaboration and Cover-Up
  A surprising revelation in 157-10014-10242 is the extent of the CIA’s collaboration with the Mafia to assassinate Castro, involving figures like John Rosselli, and the deliberate withholding of this information from the Warren Commission. Key figures like Robert F. Kennedy, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, and CIA Director Allen W. Dulles (a Warren Commission member) knew of the plot but kept silent. This cover-up is shocking because it suggests that the U.S. government was more concerned with hiding its own illicit activities than fully investigating JFK’s death. The CIA’s fear that revealing the Castro retaliation evidence might “inflame the American people” indicates they believed the evidence was credible, which challenges the official narrative of Oswald acting alone.
• Robert F. Kennedy’s Role
  Robert F. Kennedy’s involvement is particularly surprising. In 157-10014-10242, he was briefed on the CIA-Mafia plot on May 7, 1962, and cautioned the CIA against proceeding without his approval. He also informed Hoover of the plot but did not disclose it to the Warren Commission. As JFK’s brother and a key overseer of CIA activities, his silence is troubling. It suggests either complicity in the cover-up or a belief that the Cuban angle was too dangerous to pursue publicly, possibly due to Cold War tensions and the risk of war with Cuba and the Soviet Union.
• Plausible Deniability and White House Knowledge
  The same file notes that a high-level CIA official testified that the White House was likely briefed on the Castro assassination plots through “plausible deniability,” using vague language to shield the President from accountability. This practice, as described in a Senate report, allowed senior officials to deny knowledge of operations if they were exposed. This raises the question: if JFK was unaware of the plots, as his advisers claimed, who authorized them? The use of plausible deniability suggests a deeper level of secrecy and potential rogue elements within the CIA, which could have contributed to a conspiracy involving Cuba—either as a perpetrator or a scapegoat.
• The Official Narrative vs. the Evidence
  The official narrative, established by the Warren Commission, holds that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in assassinating JFK. However, the newly released files challenge this conclusion. The CIA’s evidence of Cuban retaliation, Oswald’s visit to the Cuban embassy, the Mexico City intelligence, and the timing of the AM/LASH operation all point to a possible Cuban connection that was never fully explored. The deliberate suppression of this information by the CIA, Robert F. Kennedy, and others suggests that the official narrative may have been shaped to avoid a confrontation with Cuba and the Soviet Union during the Cold War, rather than to reflect the full truth.

Conclusion

The newly released JFK files provide several pieces of evidence suggesting Cuban involvement in the assassination: the CIA’s immediate post-assassination evidence of Castro’s retaliation, Oswald’s visit to the Cuban embassy, intelligence from Mexico City, the timing of the AM/LASH operation, and Cuba’s documented support for subversive activities in Latin America. However, this evidence is largely circumstantial and speculative, and the CIA’s cover-up of its own actions complicates the picture. The suppression of information by key figures like Robert F. Kennedy and the CIA indicates that there may have been a concerted effort to bury the Cuban angle, either to protect U.S. interests or to hide a more complex conspiracy involving anti-Castro elements, the Mafia, or even rogue CIA operatives. These revelations challenge the official narrative of Oswald acting alone and suggest that the full truth about JFK’s assassination remains elusive.

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John F. Kennedy was killed 61 years ago today. Did Fidel Castro get him first?

 “We are prepared to fight them and answer in kind. U.S. leaders should think that if they are aiding terrorist plans to eliminate Cuban leaders, they themselves will not be safe.” 

 - Fidel Castro, September 6, 1963*

President Kennedy with the First Lady in the backseat moments in Dallas.

Sixty-one years ago, on November 22, 1963, John F. Kennedy was assassinated. At 12:30pm Central Standard Time, the Kennedys in their convertible limousine turned off Main Street at Dealey Plaza in Dallas, Texas. As they were passing the Texas School Book Depository, President John F. Kennedy was shot twice and slumped over toward First Lady Jackie Kennedy. The governor of Texas was also hit. At 1:00pm, President Kennedy was pronounced dead.

On the 61st anniversary of this political assassination the spin doctors and agents of influence continue to cloud the circumstances leading up to the murder of America's 35th president. However, the question that needs to be asked looking back to that fateful day: who benefited most from his death? Cui bono?

Following the Bay of Pigs debacle in April 1961 the White House initiated Operation Mongoose. President Kennedy's brother and Attorney General of the United States, Robert Kennedy, headed up the sustained effort to topple the Castro regime and this included the assassination of Fidel Castro.

 On December 29, 1962, President John F. Kennedy and First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy met with the Bay of Pigs veterans, and over 40,000 Cuban exiles at the Orange Bowl. On that day the returning soldiers gave President Kennedy the flag of Brigade 2506. " I want to express my great appreciation to the brigade for making the United States the custodian of this flag. I can assure you that this flag will be returned to this brigade in a free Havana," stated President Kennedy to all assembled there.

Daniel Harker of the Associated Press interviewed Fidel Castro on September 7, 1963 at the Brazilian Embassy in Havana at a reception, and in it the communist dictator made an explicit threat. “We are prepared to fight them and answer in kind. U.S. leaders should think that if they are aiding terrorist plans to eliminate Cuban leaders, they themselves will not be safe.”

It is evident in a White House memorandum from ten days before President Kennedy was killed on November 12, 1963, that the Kennedy Administration was still committed to pursuing an aggressive strategy to topple the Castro regime:

Support of Autonomous Anti-Castro Groups. The question was asked from where would the autonomous groups operate. Mr. FitzGerald replied that they would operate from outside U.S. territory. He mentioned two bases of the Artime group, one in Costa Rica and the other in Nicaragua. Also it was hoped that the autonomous group under Manolo Ray would soon get itself established in a working base, possibly Costa Rica. Mr. FitzGerald said that much could be accomplished by these autonomous groups once they become operational. A question was asked as to what decisions remain to be made. Mr. FitzGerald replied that we were looking for a reaffirmation of the program as presented, including sabotage and harassment. When asked what was planned in sabotage for the immediate future, he said that destruction operations should be carried out against a large oil refinery and storage facilities, a large electric plant, sugar refineries, railroad bridges, harbor facilities, and underwater demolition of docks and ships. The question was also raised as to whether an air strike would be effective on some of these principal targets. The consensus was that CIA should proceed with its planning for this type of activity looking toward January.

Less than eleven months after making his pledge at the Orange Bowl, President Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas by Lee Harvey Oswald.

On November 29, 1963 in a phone call with President Lyndon Baines Johnson, J. Edgar Hoover, the director of the FBI revealed Oswald’s links with the Castro regime. "This angle in Mexico is giving us a great deal of trouble because the story is they have this man Oswald getting $6500 from the Cuban Embassy and then coming back to this country with it."

Politico in 2014 reported, "White House aide Joseph Califano, who was part of the anti-Castro plotting, said he was convinced that 'Robert Kennedy experienced this unbelievable grief after his brother’s death because he believed it was linked to his—Bobby’s—efforts to kill Castro.'” 

Lee Harvey Oswald raises his fist after being captured in Dallas, TX

In 1968, Johnson told ABC reporter Howard K. Smith that “Kennedy was trying to get to Castro, but Castro got him first.”

Leo Janos, one of President Lyndon B. Johnson's former speech writers, interviewed him for the July 1973 issue of The Atlantic in which LBJ "expressed his belief that the assassination in Dallas had been part of a conspiracy. 'I never believed that Oswald acted alone, although I can accept that he pulled the trigger." Johnson said that when he had taken office he found that "we had been operating a damned Murder Inc. in the Caribbean.' A year or so before Kennedy's death a CIA-backed assassination team had been picked up in Havana. Johnson speculated that Dallas had been a retaliation for this thwarted attempt, although he couldn't prove it."

Following the President's assassination within a year Operation Mongoose was scrapped and Fidel Castro would remain in power until 2006, then replaced by his brother Raul in a dynastic succession following a health crisis. General Raul Castro remains the maximum authority in Cuba. Fidel Castro died of old age after causing much suffering in Cuba and around the world in places such as Ethiopia, Nicaragua, and Venezuela.

Respected German documentary filmmaker Wilfried Huismann in 2006 made the case that Fidel Castro was behind the killing of the 35th president, and explained why.

We settled the question of why in three years of research on this documentary in Mexico, USA and Cuba. Oswald had been an agent for the Cuban intelligence services since November 1962. He was a political fanatic and allowed himself to be used by the Cuban intelligence services to kill John F. Kennedy. It was a Cuban reaction to the repeated attempts of the Kennedy brothers, above all the younger Kennedy, Robert, to get rid of Fidel Castro through political assassination -- a duel between the Kennedys and the Castros, which, like in a Greek tragedy, left one of the duelists dead.

 

Fidel Castro and John F. Kennedy.

President Trump returns to office next year, and during the campaign he promised to declassify all the remaining government records surrounding the assassination if he got a second term. Will Havana's role finally be fully exposed in this historic crime?

 

"Los líderes norteamericanos deben pensar que si están cooperando con los planes terroristas para eliminar a líderes cubanos, ellos mismos no estarán seguros" -Fidel Castro

Lee Harvey Oswald and the assassination of John F. Kennedy: Cui Bono?

“We are prepared to fight them and answer in kind. U.S. leaders should think that if they are aiding terrorist plans to eliminate Cuban leaders, they themselves will not be safe.”  - Fidel Castro, September 6, 1963

John F. Kennedy was assassinated 60 years ago. Cui bono?

60 years ago on November 22, 1963 John F. Kennedy was assassinated. At 12:30pm Central Standard Time the Kennedys in their convertible limousine turned off Main Street at Dealey Plaza in Dallas, Texas. As they were passing the Texas School Book Depository, President John F. Kennedy was shot twice and slumped over toward First Lady Jackie Kennedy. The governor of Texas was also hit. At 1:00pm President Kennedy was pronounced dead.

On the 60th anniversary of this political assassination the spin doctors and agents of influence continue to cloud the circumstances leading up to the murder of America's 35th president. However, the question that needs to be asked looking back to that fateful day: who benefited most from his death? Cui bono?

Following the Bay of Pigs debacle in April of 1961 the Kennedy brothers initiated Operation Mongoose. President Kennedy's brother and Attorney General of the United States, Robert Kennedy, headed up the sustained effort to topple the Castro regime and this included the assassination of Fidel Castro. 

President John F. Kennedy and First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy addressed Brigade 2506 at the Orange Bowl in Miami on December 29, 1962 where he was given a flag of the Brigade and President Kennedy pledged that their flag would be returned to them in a free Havana.

The Kennedy Administration was committed to regime change in Cuba by whatever means necessary. 

 

Ten days prior to President Kennedy's assassination on November 12, 1963, in a White House memorandum, the continued commitment of the Kennedy Administration to pursue an aggressive policy to overthrow the Castro regime is clear:

(f) Support of Autonomous Anti-Castro Groups. The question was asked from where would the autonomous groups operate. Mr. Fitzgerald replied that they would operate from outside U.S. territory. He mentioned two bases of the Artime group, one in Costa Rica and the other in Nicaragua. Also it was hoped that the autonomous group under Manolo Ray would soon get itself established in a working base, possibly Costa Rica. Mr. Fitzgerald said that much could be accomplished by these autonomous groups once they become operational. A question was asked as to what decisions remain to be made. Mr. Fitzgerald replied that we were looking for a reaffirmation of the program as presented, including sabotage and harassment. When asked what was planned in sabotage for the immediate future, he said that destruction operations should be carried out against a large oil refinery and storage facilities, a large electric plant, sugar refineries, railroad bridges, harbor facilities, and underwater demolition of docks and ships. The question was also raised as to whether an air strike would be effective on some of these principal targets. The consensus was that CIA should proceed with its planning for this type of activity looking toward January.

Following the President's assassination within a year these operations were mothballed and Fidel Castro would remain in power until 2006, then replaced by his brother Raul in a dynastic succession following a health crisis. General Raul Castro remains the maximum authority in Cuba today with a puppet president.

German journalist and documentary filmmaker Wilfried Huismann described the circumstances surrounding the assassination of John F. Kennedy and the subsequent cover up by the Johnson White House with the tacit approval of Robert Kennedy in his 2006 documentary Rendezvous with Death. At the time of the film's release Huismann gave an interview in Deutsche Welle on January 5, 2006 titled "Castro ordered Kennedy's Assassination." 

Below is an excerpt:

DW-WORLD: We know that Lee Harvey Oswald killed John F. Kennedy. But who ordered his assassination and why? 

Wilfried Huismann: We settled the question of why in three years of research on this documentary in Mexico, USA and Cuba. Oswald had been an agent for the Cuban intelligence services since November 1962. He was a political fanatic and allowed himself to be used by the Cuban intelligence services to kill John F. Kennedy. It was a Cuban reaction to the repeated attempts of the Kennedy brothers, above all the younger Kennedy, Robert, to get rid of Fidel Castro through political assassination -- a duel between the Kennedys and the Castros, which, like in a Greek tragedy, left one of the duelists dead.

Declassified records in recent years corroborate Huismann's argument.

CIA documents, released in October of 2017, speculate that Oswald's motive for killing Kennedy was that he was "enraged after reading a detailed article in his hometown newspaper in New Orleans in September suggesting that his hero Castro had been targeted for assassination by the Kennedy administration." Oswald sought vengeance on Castro's behalf.  This was an embarrassment for the CIA and the White House that had repeatedly tried to assassinate Castro, and that President Kennedy's murder was blow back.

Another declassified CIA document, released in October 17, 2017 cites Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs and later U.S. Ambassador to Mexico, Thomas C. Mann who said "he had a 'feeling in his guts' that Castro paid Lee Harvey Oswald to assassinate the 35th president on November 22, 1963, in Dallas, Texas." 

Pedro Roig, of the Cuban Studies Institute has outlined the information available on Lee Harvey Oswald and his links to the Castro regime from documented sources.

 Cui bono?  Operation Mongoose operations were phased out after the assassination of President Kennedy and the departure of Robert Kennedy from his position as Attorney General in September of 1964. Regime change operations in Cuba came to an end and the Castro regime would remain in power to the present day.

Below is the 2006 German documentary Rendezvous with Death by Wilfried Huismann.

Brian Latell, PhD, author of Castro's Secrets: The CIA and Cuba's Intelligence Machine, gave a presentation to the Association of Former Intelligence Officers at their June 1, 2012 luncheon in McLean, Virginia in which he addressed the information known then on the Castro regime and the Kennedy Assassination.

On September 15, 2015 the international media reported on a newly declassified memo from the CIA concerning presidential assassin Lee Harvey Oswald that reported the following:

Three days after the shooting in Dallas, Texas, on 22 November 1963, Lyndon B Johnson was informed that Oswald had visited the Cuban and former Soviet Union embassies in Mexico City on 28 September 1963 to arrange visas.

The Daily Mail reported that the memo had "remained a secret until January 21, 2016, when the CIA released 19,000 confidential documents from the 1960s."

Paul Gregory, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution and author of "The Oswalds: An Untold Account of Marina and Lee,” who spent time with both Lee Harvey Oswald and his wife Marina prior to the assassination in a column today make the case that Oswald acted alone.

Oswald’s motive may have been an effort to impress the Cuban dictatorship, and receive asylum there in exchange for killing President Kennedy.

The Mob Museum in November 22, 2021 published an article “Assassination expert says Cubans encouraged Oswald to kill JFK” with the subtitle “Evidence suggests President Johnson covered up Cuba link to avoid World War III.”

Gus Russo, author and JFK assassination expert, interviewed the case officer, Ray Wannall, of two brothers who by 1964 had secretly been working for the FBI informing on the Communist Party for 10 years. Morris and Jack Childs in June 1964 met with Fidel Castro in Cuba “seven months after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in Dallas on November 22, 1963.” This is the breakdown of that conversation by Russo, together with other details by Cuban sources.

The brothers listened to Castro tell them about a trip by Kennedy’s accused assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, to the Cuban embassy in Mexico City in September 1963. During the visit, Oswald sought a visa to immigrate to Cuba, but grew desperate when he could not get one right away. … “What they reported was that Castro told them that Oswald had come into the embassy in Mexico City – and Castro said, ‘I knew about it when it happened,’ it was reported to him – and he [Oswald] offered to kill President Kennedy,” Russo said. “He said, ‘I’ll kill that bastard Kennedy,’ ostensibly for the [Cuban] revolution.”

John F. Kennedy was killed 59 years ago today. Did Fidel Castro get him first?

Fifty-nine years ago, on November 22, 1963, John F. Kennedy was assassinated. At 12:30pm Central Standard Time, the Kennedys in their convertible limousine turned off Main Street at Dealey Plaza in Dallas, Texas. As they were passing the Texas School Book Depository, President John F. Kennedy was shot twice and slumped over toward First Lady Jackie Kennedy. The governor of Texas was also hit. At 1:00pm, President Kennedy was pronounced dead.

On the 59th anniversary of this political assassination the spin doctors and agents of influence continue to cloud the circumstances leading up to the murder of America's 35th president. However, the question that needs to be asked looking back to that fateful day: who benefited most from his death? Cui bono?

Following the Bay of Pigs debacle in April 1961 the White House initiated Operation Mongoose. President Kennedy's brother and Attorney General of the United States, Robert Kennedy, headed up the sustained effort to topple the Castro regime and this included the assassination of Fidel Castro.

On December 29, 1962, President John F. Kennedy and First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy met with the Bay of Pigs veterans, and over 40,000 Cuban exiles at the Orange Bowl. On that day the returning soldiers gave President Kennedy the flag of Brigade 2506. " I want to express my great appreciation to the brigade for making the United States the custodian of this flag. I can assure you that this flag will be returned to this brigade in a free Havana," stated President Kennedy to all assembled there.

Daniel Harker of the Associated Press interviewed Fidel Castro on September 7, 1963 at the Brazilian Embassy in Havana at a reception, and in it the communist dictator made an explicit threat. “We are prepared to fight them and answer in kind. U.S. leaders should think that if they are aiding terrorist plans to eliminate Cuban leaders, they themselves will not be safe.”

It is evident in a White House memorandum from ten days before President Kennedy was killed on November 12, 1963, that the Kennedy Administration was still committed to pursuing an aggressive strategy to topple the Castro regime:

Support of Autonomous Anti-Castro Groups. The question was asked from where would the autonomous groups operate. Mr. FitzGerald replied that they would operate from outside U.S. territory. He mentioned two bases of the Artime group, one in Costa Rica and the other in Nicaragua. Also it was hoped that the autonomous group under Manolo Ray would soon get itself established in a working base, possibly Costa Rica. Mr. FitzGerald said that much could be accomplished by these autonomous groups once they become operational. A question was asked as to what decisions remain to be made. Mr. FitzGerald replied that we were looking for a reaffirmation of the program as presented, including sabotage and harassment. When asked what was planned in sabotage for the immediate future, he said that destruction operations should be carried out against a large oil refinery and storage facilities, a large electric plant, sugar refineries, railroad bridges, harbor facilities, and underwater demolition of docks and ships. The question was also raised as to whether an air strike would be effective on some of these principal targets. The consensus was that CIA should proceed with its planning for this type of activity looking toward January.

Less than eleven months after making his pledge at the Orange Bowl, President Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas by Lee Harvey Oswald.

 

 

On November 29, 1963 in a phone call with President Lyndon Baines Johnson, J. Edgar Hoover, the director of the FBI revealed Oswald’s links with the Castro regime. "This angle in Mexico is giving us a great deal of trouble because the story is they have this man Oswald getting $6500 from the Cuban Embassy and then coming back to this country with it."

Politico in 2014 reported, "White House aide Joseph Califano, who was part of the anti-Castro plotting, said he was convinced that 'Robert Kennedy experienced this unbelievable grief after his brother’s death because he believed it was linked to his—Bobby’s—efforts to kill Castro.'” 

Lee Harvey Oswald raises his fist after being captured in Dallas, TX

In 1968, Johnson told ABC reporter Howard K. Smith that “Kennedy was trying to get to Castro, but Castro got him first.”

Leo Janos, one of President Lyndon B. Johnson's former speech writers, interviewed him for the July 1973 issue of The Atlantic in which LBJ "expressed his belief that the assassination in Dallas had been part of a conspiracy. 'I never believed that Oswald acted alone, although I can accept that he pulled the trigger." Johnson said that when he had taken office he found that "we had been operating a damned Murder Inc. in the Caribbean.' A year or so before Kennedy's death a CIA-backed assassination team had been picked up in Havana. Johnson speculated that Dallas had been a retaliation for this thwarted attempt, although he couldn't prove it."

Following the President's assassination within a year Operation Mongoose was scrapped and Fidel Castro would remain in power until 2006, then replaced by his brother Raul in a dynastic succession following a health crisis. General Raul Castro remains the maximum authority in Cuba. Fidel Castro died of old age after causing much suffering in Cuba and around the world in places such as Ethiopia, Nicaragua, and Venezuela.

Respected German documentary filmmaker Wilfried Huismann in 2006 made the case that Fidel Castro was behind the killing of the 35th president, and explained why.

We settled the question of why in three years of research on this documentary in Mexico, USA and Cuba. Oswald had been an agent for the Cuban intelligence services since November 1962. He was a political fanatic and allowed himself to be used by the Cuban intelligence services to kill John F. Kennedy. It was a Cuban reaction to the repeated attempts of the Kennedy brothers, above all the younger Kennedy, Robert, to get rid of Fidel Castro through political assassination -- a duel between the Kennedys and the Castros, which, like in a Greek tragedy, left one of the duelists dead.

 

Fidel Castro and John F. Kennedy.

 

One last observation: What does it mean that today is the day Vladimir Putin chose to dedicate a statue of Fidel Castro in Moscow with Miguel Diaz-Canel of the Castro dictatorship in attendance, given the probability that Fidel Castro had President Kennedy assassinated on this day in 1963? 

 

Lee Harvey Oswald and the assassination of John F. Kennedy: Cui Bono?

“We are prepared to fight them and answer in kind. U.S. leaders should think that if they are aiding terrorist plans to eliminate Cuban leaders, they themselves will not be safe.”  - Fidel Castro, September 6, 1963

John F. Kennedy was assassinated 58 years ago. Cui bono?

 58 years ago on November 22, 1963 John F. Kennedy was assassinated. At 12:30pm Central Standard Time the Kennedys in their convertible limousine turned off Main Street at Dealey Plaza in Dallas, Texas. As they were passing the Texas School Book Depository, President John F. Kennedy was shot twice and slumped over toward First Lady Jackie Kennedy. The governor of Texas was also hit. At 1:00pm President Kennedy was pronounced dead.

On the 58th anniversary of this political assassination the spin doctors and agents of influence continue to cloud the circumstances leading up to the murder of America's 35th president. However, the question that needs to be asked looking back to that fateful day: who benefited most from his death? Cui bono?

Following the Bay of Pigs debacle in April of 1961 the Kennedy brothers initiated Operation Mongoose. President Kennedy's brother and Attorney General of the United States, Robert Kennedy, headed up the sustained effort to topple the Castro regime and this included the assassination of Fidel Castro. 

President John F. Kennedy and First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy addressed Brigade 2506 at the Orange Bowl in Miami on December 29, 1962 where he was given a flag of the Brigade and President Kennedy pledged that their flag would be returned to them in a free Havana.

The Kennedy Administration was committed to regime change in Cuba by whatever means necessary. 

 

Ten days prior to President Kennedy's assassination on November 12, 1963, in a White House memorandum, the continued commitment of the Kennedy Administration to pursue an aggressive policy to overthrow the Castro regime is clear:

(f) Support of Autonomous Anti-Castro Groups. The question was asked from where would the autonomous groups operate. Mr. Fitzgerald replied that they would operate from outside U.S. territory. He mentioned two bases of the Artime group, one in Costa Rica and the other in Nicaragua. Also it was hoped that the autonomous group under Manolo Ray would soon get itself established in a working base, possibly Costa Rica. Mr. Fitzgerald said that much could be accomplished by these autonomous groups once they become operational. A question was asked as to what decisions remain to be made. Mr. Fitzgerald replied that we were looking for a reaffirmation of the program as presented, including sabotage and harassment. When asked what was planned in sabotage for the immediate future, he said that destruction operations should be carried out against a large oil refinery and storage facilities, a large electric plant, sugar refineries, railroad bridges, harbor facilities, and underwater demolition of docks and ships. The question was also raised as to whether an air strike would be effective on some of these principal targets. The consensus was that CIA should proceed with its planning for this type of activity looking toward January.

Following the President's assassination within a year these operations were mothballed and Fidel Castro would remain in power until 2006, then replaced by his brother Raul in a dynastic succession following a health crisis. General Raul Castro remains the maximum authority in Cuba today as head of the Cuban Communist Party.

German journalist and documentary filmmaker Wilfried Huismann described the circumstances surrounding the assassination of John F. Kennedy and the subsequent cover up by the Johnson White House with the tacit approval of Robert Kennedy in his 2006 documentary Rendezvous with Death. At the time of the film's release Huismann gave an interview in Deutsche Welle on January 5, 2006 titled "Castro ordered Kennedy's Assassination." Below is an excerpt:

DW-WORLD: We know that Lee Harvey Oswald killed John F. Kennedy. But who ordered his assassination and why? 

Wilfried Huismann: We settled the question of why in three years of research on this documentary in Mexico, USA and Cuba. Oswald had been an agent for the Cuban intelligence services since November 1962. He was a political fanatic and allowed himself to be used by the Cuban intelligence services to kill John F. Kennedy. It was a Cuban reaction to the repeated attempts of the Kennedy brothers, above all the younger Kennedy, Robert, to get rid of Fidel Castro through political assassination -- a duel between the Kennedys and the Castros, which, like in a Greek tragedy, left one of the duelists dead.

Declassified records in recent years corroborate Huismann's argument.

CIA documents, released in October of 2017, speculate that Oswald's motive for killing Kennedy was that he was "enraged after reading a detailed article in his hometown newspaper in New Orleans in September suggesting that his hero Castro had been targeted for assassination by the Kennedy administration." Oswald sought vengeance on Castro's behalf.  This was an embarrassment for the CIA and the White House that had repeatedly tried to assassinate Castro, and that President Kennedy's murder was blow back.

Another declassified CIA document, released in October 17, 2017 cites Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs and later U.S. Ambassador to Mexico, Thomas C. Mann who said "he had a 'feeling in his guts' that Castro paid Lee Harvey Oswald to assassinate the 35th president on November 22, 1963, in Dallas, Texas." 

Pedro Roig, of the Cuban Studies Institute has outlined the information available on Lee Harvey Oswald and his links to the Castro regime from documented sources.

Cui bono?  Operation Mongoose operations were phased out after the assassination of President Kennedy and the departure of Robert Kennedy from his position as Attorney General in September of 1964. Regime change operations in Cuba came to an end and the Castro regime would remain in power to the present day.

Below is the 2006 German documentary Rendezvous with Death by Wilfried Huismann.

Brian Latell, PhD, author of Castro's Secrets: The CIA and Cuba's Intelligence Machine, gave a presentation to the Association of Former Intelligence Officers at their June 1, 2012 luncheon in McLean, Virginia in which he addressed the information known then on the Castro regime and the Kennedy Assassination.

On September 15, 2015 the international media reported on a newly declassified memo from the CIA concerning presidential assassin Lee Harvey Oswald that reported the following:

Three days after the shooting in Dallas, Texas, on 22 November 1963, Lyndon B Johnson was informed that Oswald had visited the Cuban and former Soviet Union embassies in Mexico City on 28 September 1963 to arrange visas.

The Daily Mail reported that the memo had "remained a secret until January 21, 2016, when the CIA released 19,000 confidential documents from the 1960s."

Brigade 2506, the Bay of Pigs at sixty and some historical context.

"It doesn't take a hero to order men into battle. It takes a hero to be one of those men who goes into battle." - Norman Schwarzkopf 

Sixty years ago Brigade 2506 members invaded Cuba seeking to end the communist dictatorship then being consolidated by Fidel Castro. Before the world knew what was going on in Cuba, these Cubans tried to prevent these 62 years and counting of horror under the communist dictatorship of the Castro brothers. Outnumbered and outgunned they fought between April 17-19, 1961 and one hundred and four Brigade 2506 members died fighting to liberate Cuba, and eight were executed by firing squad. Most Brigade members were captured and spent 22 months in prison before a ransom was paid for their release.

Cuba's last legitimately elected president, Carlos Prio Socarras, was voted in by Cubans in free and fair elections on July 1, 1948 and assumed office on October 10, 1948. He was a democrat, who respected civil liberties, and presided over years of prosperity and freedom for Cubans. President Prio Socarras belonged to the Autentico Party and succeeded Ramon Grau San Martin, another member of the same political party in the Cuban presidency. On his watch Cuban diplomats played an important role in the drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. President Carlos Prío Socarras and his wife Mary Tarrero de Prío went into exile in Miami, but his struggle for a democratic Cuba did not end there. He would be arrested on more than one occasion accused of smuggling arms to rebels in Cuba seeking to overthrow Fulgencio Batista.

Cuba's last constitutional president announced his plan to return to the island as early as 1955 and did so during a brief "amnesty" in 1956 only to be expelled at gunpoint a short time later. Prío Socarras would return again in January 1959 when Fulgencio Batista fled power. The Castro brothers and their guerillas promised to restore democracy obtaining the support of the United States. Behind the scenes, despite their public claims, the revolutionaries began immediately consolidating power and marginalizing or disappearing anti-communists from their ranks such as Huber Matos. Publicly, beginning in January 1959 they began broadcasting the public execution of regime opponents by firing squads.

 

In March 1960 radio stations were seized by the revolutionary government in Cuba, this was followed by the taking of newspapers in May 1960. In July 1960 all U.S. businesses and commercial property in Cuba were nationalized at the direction of the Cuban government. In September 1960 the Committees for the Defense of the Revolution (CDRs) were established throughout Cuba and the close surveillance of all Cubans began. In October 1960 Cuban-owned large and middle sized private enterprises nationalized and all rental properties seized, along with commercial bank accounts. What remained were small and micro enterprises.

President Carlos Prío Socarras departed for exile again in December 1960 as the Castro government turned into a communist military dictatorship. Cuba in the span of two years had transitioned from an authoritarian regime to a totalitarian communist one. It was in this context that Cuban exiles joined Brigade 2506 to overthrow the communist dictatorship in Havana.

Barbara Gutierrez of UNEWS at the University of Miami interviewed Eduardo Zayas Bazán and on April 14th published the article "Cuban exile reminisces about the Bay of Pigs invasion" that described the stakes confronted by these young Cuban exiles in 1961: "When he was 25 years old, Cuban exile Eduardo Zayas Bazán, fearful that his homeland would forever remain under communist rule, made a fateful decision. Leaving behind his young wife and 2-month-old son, he enlisted in a CIA-led mission to secretly invade Cuba and defeat the Castro regime."

They risked life and limb to liberate their homeland, and over a hundred died in the venture, and hundreds more suffered imprisonment as prisoners of war between April 1961 and December 1962.

In the short term the failure of the Bay of Pigs invasion led to Soviets, perceiving American weakness, deploying dozens of medium-range nuclear missiles within striking range of the entire United States, and the subsequent Cuban Missile Crisis that brought the world to the brink of nuclear holocaust egged on by Fidel Castro in October 1962. 

On December 24, 1962, captured prisoners of war of the Brigade 2506 were released from Castro’s prison and flew to Miami. Five days later on December 29, 1962, President John Kennedy and First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy met with the Bay of Pigs veterans, and over 40,000 Cuban exiles at the Orange Bowl. On that day the returning soldiers gave President Kennedy the flag of the Brigade and the President pledged that the Brigade flag was to “fly again in a free Havana.” Less than a year later on November 22, 1963 President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas by pro-Castro activist Lee Harvey Oswald. 

Over the long term the Castro dictatorship has been in power for 62 years and has successfully exported its "model" to Nicaragua and Venezuela spreading misery and terror to millions more while sponsoring revolutionary terror around the globe.

Sixty years after the Bay of Pigs, and the courageous sacrifice of the Brigade 2506 members, and the haunting question remains: "How much better would Cuba and the wider region be today if Castro had been overthrown in 1961?"