Word: castros
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...suspicion that Castro or his agents could have conspired with Lee Harvey Oswald to kill Kennedy rests chiefly on the fact that the Cuban leader had reason to be angry with the President. There had been the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion and the 1962 Cuban missile crisis. Additionally, the CIA tried to assassinate Castro in the 1960s, using U.S. mobsters as hit men. There is also some slight circumstantial evidence for the theory. In September 1963 Oswald sought a visa to enter Cuba at the country's consulate in Mexico City. That same year, Oswald was arrested...
...most eloquent testimony against the theory came from Castro himself, who talked for 4½ hours with committee members in Havana last April. Tape-recorded portions of the interview were played last week and translated. Said Castro: "Who here could have operated and planned something so delicate as the death of the United States' President? That would have been the most perfect pretext for the United States to invade our country, which is what I have tried to prevent for all these years, in every possible sense. What could we gain from a war with the United States? The destruction would...
What of his 1963 statement on assassination plots? Castro said it was only a signal to the U.S. that he was aware of the attempts on his life and they should be stopped. He added: "I said something like 'Those plots start to set a very bad precedent, a very serious one, that could become a boomerang against the authors of those actions.' But I did not mean to threaten by that. I did not mean by that that we were going to take measures ?similar measures?like a retaliation...
There have been reports that Oswald, when seeking his visa to Cuba, told Cuba's Mexican Consul, Eusebio Azcue, of his plans to kill Kennedy and that the information was relayed to Castro, who did not take it seriously. This was contained in a National Enquirer article by British Journalist Comer Clark. Castro scoffed at the report as fictitious. Azcue recalled Oswald as having been "discourteous" when his visa application was rejected but said that they never talked about Kennedy. Nonetheless, the House committee staff cryptically reported to the Congressmen that "the substance of the Clark article is supported...
Ford acknowledged that the CIA had never told the Warren Commission about its attempts to assassinate Castro. "Why we weren't given it, I frankly don't understand," he said. Yet he insisted that the information would not have changed the commission's conclusion that Oswald acted alone, because the members had thoroughly studied the possibility of Cuban involvement anyway. Ford said the idea was presented in strong arguments by the U.S. Ambassador to Mexico, who felt that Castro was somehow involved...