Try This JFK Murder Whodunnit: The Cubans

Persuasive evidence of Castro's hand in the JFK assassination gets short shrift as researchers aim at CIA, mobsters, oil men, you name it

At 2 pm on November 22, 1963, a Cuban intelligence agent in Havana’s embassy in Mexico City by the name of Maria Luisa Calderon got a call from an excited friend.

Local agents for the CIA were secretly listening in.

“Luisa, Kennedy has been killed! Assassinated in Texas,” her friend giddily announced.

“No, really? When?”

“At one o’clock—”

“Fantastic! Wonderful,” Calderon said, laughing.

1961: A gloating Fidel Castro meets the press after increasing the ransom for 1,173 prisoners captured by Cuban forces in the April Bay of Pigs invasion (Alan Oxley/Getty Images)

 “Apparently, his wife and brother were also wounded—”  

“Wonderful,” Luisa exclaimed. “What good news!”

A few minutes later,  Calderon got another excited call from a friend. 

“Luisa, have you heard about Kennedy yet?!”

“Yes,” she replied. “I knew almost before Kennedy did.”

“They’ve arrested the guy. He’s president of a Fair Play for Cuba Committee.”

“I already knew that. A gringo, right?”

“It seems he lived for a time in Russia, but they wouldn’t grant him citizenship—”

“Damn it! How do they know that already?! Did they say his name?”

“Oswald—something like that. He hasn’t confessed to anything . . .”

And so on.  The tape was obtained by investigative journalist Gus Russo, whose much overlooked 2008 book, Brothers in Arms: The Kennedys, the Castros, and the Politics of Murder, is a worthy alternative to the decades-long clamor attributing JFK’s murder to plots involving various parties—the CIA, mobsters, right wing oil men, acting singly or in concert—depending on your predilection. Russo’s case, backed up by his interviews with Cuban intelligence officials, agents and defectors—all of whom also appear in a documentary film companion to the book— posits that Fidel Castro learned of the offer from Lee Harvey Oswald, broke and desperate to make something of himself, to kill Kennedy and that his agents had encouraged him to kill Kennedy. 

”That came from the G2 leadership,” former Cuban intelligence official Oscar Marino says in Russo’s book and film, Rendezvous With Death , which was broadcast on German television but never shown in the U.S.