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New film resurrects Castro
connection
By Carlos Alberto Montaner,
www.firmaspress.com. Posted on Tue, Jan.
17, 2006 in The Miami Herald.
I despise conspiracy theories, but sometimes
one has to surrender to the evidence. With
abundant proof at hand, German documentary
filmmaker Wilfried Huismann has attributed
to Fidel Castro the responsibility for the
assassination of President John F. Kennedy
on Nov. 22, 1963.
Shown for the first time on German public
TV, the documentary, Rendezvous with Death:
Castro and Kennedy, contributes several
documents and some testimony that are newsworthy.
But its most convincing element is a report
from Mexican intelligence that states that
in September 1963 Lee Harvey Oswald received
in Mexico $6,500 from the Cuban secret services
to help him carry out the planned crime.
Oscar Marino -- a former officer in Cuba's
state security apparatus, now elderly and
in exile -- corroborated the research done
by the German filmmaker: ''He offered to
kill Kennedy, and we used him,'' he told
Huismann.
This is not the first time that this theory
is put forward. Jackie Kennedy and Lyndon
B. Johnson, two of the people closest to
the late president, believed it firmly but
withheld their certainty to avoid provoking
another incident with the Soviet Union.
Had they revealed their well-founded suspicions
at that time, and given the indignation
that filled U.S. society, an invasion of
Cuba to punish the guilty would have been
inevitable. But the shaken White House did
not wish another dangerous confrontation
with the Kremlin similar to the one in October
1962 that brought the planet to the brink
of nuclear war.
Bobby Kennedy, then U.S. attorney general,
surely shared the same suspicion, but it
wasn't to his advantage to accuse Castro.
In the end, it seems that the Cuban dictator
-- as he told the Brazilian ambassador in
Havana a few days before the crime -- was
responding in that manner to the assassination
attempts organized by the president's brother,
with the help of the Mafia.
Beyond this reprehensible concealment of
information from the American people, strategies
were developed in Washington and Havana
to manipulate public opinion. In Washington,
FBI investigators were braked and diverted
from the right leads, especially those from
Mexican sources; and the Warren Commission
was created to persuade the world that president's
death had been the isolated and solitary
work of a peculiar, out-of-control madman.
In Havana, Fabián Escalante, the
intelligence officer who traveled to Dallas
on the day of Kennedy's assassination (to
monitor the operation?) and today is a general
and former chief of intelligence, elaborated
the theory -- to cover his own tracks --
that other gunmen fired at Kennedy.
Escalante blamed Herminio Díaz,
an exile with a record of violence and a
former comrade of Castro in the Insurrectional
Cuban Union in the late 1940s. Díaz
was allegedly aided in the assassination
by Eladio del Valle, another exile with
troubling antecedents.
Naturally, by the time Escalante's alibi
came to light, both Díaz and del
Valle had been conveniently liquidated by
the Cuban security services, so they couldn't
defend themselves.
Left untied, however, is the string that
leads to Jack Ruby, Oswald's murderer. Why
would a person with the moral turpitude
of Ruby, who was neither a fanatic nor a
patriot but appeared to be a disciplined
Mafioso, sacrifice himself and execute Oswald
on national television?
To answer that, we must pose the classic
police question: Who benefited directly
from Oswald's death? Undoubtedly, the Mafiosi,
Bobby Kennedy and Castro -- people who would
have run into serious problems if their
dark machinations had become public.
In any case, what's extraordinarily shameful
is that:
o The Bush administration, in view of the
new evidence brought forth by the Germans,
has not reopened the investigation to give
U.S. society the definitive truth -- something
that has been covered up for so many years.
o Sen. Ted Kennedy and the rest of that
powerful family haven't told everything
they know, believe or suspect about the
death of John, the most illustrious member
of the family and the most admired U.S.
president of the late 20th century.
©2006 Firmas Press
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