. . . to some extent it is as though Batista was the incarnation
of a number ofsins on the part of the United States. Now
we shall have to pay for those sins.
—PRESIDENT JOHN F. KENNEDY, OCTOBER 24, 19631
When the murder of John F. Kennedy was announced as my plane to Minneapolis was landing, a young man behind me wearing a Goldwater button leaped up and cheered. He quickly returned to his seat amidst stony passenger silence. I deplaned long enough to make contact with some waiting students, turned around as quickly as possible, and flew back to Detroit, then spent several days huddled with close friends in Ann Arbor. One year before, the Cuban missile crisis had turned life as I knew it upside down. Now, the assassination became a second unthinkable catastrophe, and once again the subject of Cuba was in the air.
Within minutes, allegations were swirling that the shooter, Lee Harvey Oswald, was aligned with Fair Play for Cuba and was a former defector to the Soviet Union. In the confusion, rumors spread that he was connected to SDS as well. Nightmares of sudden war and domestic roundups flashed through my mind. I was twenty-three. Ricardo, then the youngest member of the Cuban foreign ministry staff, was twenty-six.
I remember being stoic, even cold, trying hard to concentrate and hold on to my mind, as my assumptions all lay shattered again. In the days after JFK’s killing, I braced for a knock on the door, detentions, maybe bullets through the window. The SDS staff in New York tore through our national membership files and correspondence. No Oswald. Phone lines burned with long-distance questions, speculation, suggestions.
Shortly, a narrative took shape in the national media. Oswald was definitely a lone crackpot, not a conspirator. I wrote in The Daily, ostensibly reviewing a performance I’d seen, but also touching on larger issues:
Brecht on Brecht was performed in a mournful Hill [Auditorium] Monday night, and must be considered ultimately in its relation to the macabre assassinations of John Kennedy and Lee Oswald.
[Brecht] would attack an order which quietly assassinates meaning and new possibilities wherever they are dangerous to the current social system. [This performance’s] distortion of Brecht is part of the American tendency to smother conflict for the sake of an artificial consensus, a process which generates the very parodies of protest—crime, suicide, fantasy, delinquency—that occur in Dallas and, in less spectacular ways, daily in this society.
Why can’t we face matters just as they are, see the real Brecht as he was? Would not a society capable of that be freer of the poisons which illusions release?”
Yes, Oswald called himself a Marxist, and yes, he visited the Cuban embassy in Mexico, and yes, he had returned from Russia with his wife, Marina. This framing of Oswald rested uneasily between two rival speculations in the public mind; first, that he was a Soviet and/or Cuban agent and, second, held by a minority of Americans, that he was an agent of our own or of the Mafia, who killed the president we were coming to respect, for hidden reasons of power. Either way, Cuba continued to be at the center of a global crisis, as it had been since my high school years, a potential scapegoat to be wiped from the sea.
History shows that the slightest confirmation of a Cuban hand, alone or in league with Moscow, could have triggered global war. For that reason, perhaps, the Johnson administration moved quickly to unite the country around the quickly manufactured tale of Oswald acting alone. Rumors of Mafia involvement, perhaps out of rage at Kennedy’s crackdown on the Mob, Kennedy’s “loss” of the Cuban casinos, perhaps in dark alliance with the Cuban exiles, were pushed off the public radar.
The truth was covered up. Even today, millions of files at the National Archive contain redactions that won’t be unsealed until 2017.2 Over one thousand records—each of them one to twenty pages in length—are held from release by the Assassinations Records Review Board (ARRB). Additionally, unknown numbers of Warren Commission documents are buried in the National Archive. Perhaps most interesting are the CIA’s 295 “Joannides files”3 sought by reporters and researchers for decades without result.
George E. Joannides was the CIA case officer who secretly organized, directed, and funded, at $50,000 a month, an anti-Castro Directorio Revolucionario Estudiantil (Revolutionary Student Directorate or DRE).4
RICARDO: It was another thing completely unrelated to the DR 13 de Marzo.5 It was organized at Havana University by some right-wing students who tried to take the name because of its strong associations, not only from the struggle against Batista but also from before, against Machado.
Joannides failed in trying to carry out the counterrevolution. According to Jefferson Morley, a former Washington Post reporter whom I interviewed in 2013, “they had some support in Havana in 1959 but wouldn’t support the revolution, even from within, so they moved to Miami where the CIA picked them up as articulate young people.”6 The group, whose plain purpose was to overthrow Fidel, had an estimated membership in the thousands, and members were deployed across the United States, Latin America, and international student conferences to battle the Cuban Communists. The Greek-born Joannides was transferred from Athens to the Miami CIA station by 1963, where he managed the DRE. Joannides was titled the Miami deputy director of psychological warfare operations, code-named “JM/WAVE.”
The CIA was later forced to acknowledge in federal court that in August 1963 Oswald paid a friendly visit to a Directorate official in New Orleans only to be seen a short while later handing out pro-Cuba literature. A brawl and a radio confrontation ensued between Oswald and the New Orleans DRE militants. Oswald appeared to be playing a double role. According to the New York Times, “speculation about who might have been behind [Oswald] has never ended, with various theories focusing on Mr. Castro, the Mob, rogue government agents, or myriad combinations of the above.”7 Clearly, Morley told me, “Oswald was engaging in provocateur behavior, offering to go fight in Cuba, mentioning his Marine experience, then turning around with the pro-Cuba leaflets. That kind of political agitation is exactly what the CIA was paying the DRE to do.”
When I asked Morley if he thought Oswald was working on someone’s agenda or was nuts, he answered, “Those are the choices.” Morley’s 2003 federal lawsuit charged that Joannides had secretly financed Cuban exiles who gathered intelligence on Oswald three months before the Kennedy assassination. When Kennedy died, it was claimed, Joannides used CIA funds to help two anti-Castro militants escape the United States for Central America.8
Joannides’s role was illuminated briefly in 1978 when the CIA called him out of retirement and named him the agency’s liaison to the US House committee investigating the Kennedy assassination, while blindsiding the legislators about Joannides’s previous role of running secret operations for a violently anti-Castro organization.9 In the same disclosure, the CIA refused to release the 295 specific documents concerning Joannides’s background. Morley believes those are only administrative personnel files, not documents disclosing his career in CIA operations. In 2013, the CIA made an “amazing concession,” Morley says, when the agency for the first time acknowledged that Joannides had a residence in New Orleans in the early 1960s, when Oswald and the DRE militants were skirmishing. “For thirty years they said he wasn’t ever near New Orleans. Now there’s powerful evidence that he knew what was going on.”
Joannides went back to Athens in 1964–1968, where he participated in the military coup, then to Saigon in 1969–1970 where he reunited with his original Miami station chief, Theodore Shackley, who directed the Operation Mongoose covert operations program against Cuba with four hundreed agents at his disposal.10 He went from Miami to counterterrorism programs in Vietnam with General Lansdale. After the House assassination hearings, he faded into the shadows until dying in 1990 at age sixty-seven. His obituary identified him only as a “lawyer for the Defense Department”—“so he took the cover story right to the grave,” Morley says.
This story, however incomplete, pierces one of the most confusing aspects of November 22, 1963, emphasizing the need for full disclosure of the CIA documents still held under seal, most of which may never be released in the lifetimes of anyone in the generation for whom the assassination was a pivotal trauma. There can be no “national security” claims to those documents after fifty years. Plainly the secret-keepers intended to contain and dilute the potential public reaction to those documents until later generations. In a similar way, the 1865 killing of President Lincoln by a Confederate-based conspiracy was framed as the irrational deed of a deranged actor, not as a conspiracy to defeat the Union and block Reconstruction.
The unreleased Joannides’s file shows the CIA’s intention to control the narrative of the Kennedy assassination in a way that kept secret the CIA’s role in or knowledge of official plots to assassinate Fidel and destroy the Cuban Revolution (from injecting lethal poisons in his food and drink to burning cane fields and oil refineries).
There was no evidence of an invisible Cuban hand, according to the White House, the Warren Commission, and two congressional investigations.
After all, why would Fidel and the Cuban intelligence services, who conceivably deployed spies effectively in the Miami, Tampa, and New Orleans exile communities, carry out an execution of Kennedy, when the certain response would be the destruction of Cuba amidst a wider planetary conflagration? Not that Fidel lacked cause; he later provided Sen. George McGovern evidence of more than twenty US schemes to kill him.11 However vengeful his state of mind, Fidel’s constant purpose was to repel an invasion from the superpower to his north. And why would the Cuban government even take seriously an isolated ex-Marine and ex-defector showing up at their heavily surveilled Mexico City consulate with a plan to shoot a president? Why would they enter a conspiracy in which the president’s last-minute November 22 itinerary happened to take him by a seven-story building where Oswald happened to have been employed before the president’s plans were even known?
We know that Oswald’s last words were: “I’m a patsy.” Exactly whose “patsy” finally might be clarified if and when our government releases the remaining files.
TWO TRACKS
The Kennedy administration traveled along two tracks in its Cuba policy, which were then known in New Left thinking as the tracks of repression and cooptation. In foreign policy there was a split between those wanting to apply military force, even nuclear weapons, to “roll back” communism, and more rational minds satisfied with great power coexistence and the competition for “hearts and minds” combined with covert counterinsurgency when possible. Toward Cuba, after the Bay of Pigs humiliation, US plans were rolled out for sabotage, guerrilla war, and an invasion to topple Castro. I talked with Robert Kennedy Jr., son of the late senator, in 2014 about his childhood memories of those days:
ROBERT KENNEDY JR: At that time there was some daylight between my father and President Kennedy on that issue. My father’s focus was on freeing the prisoners that Castro took and also keeping the CIA’s pressure on Castro. We had a lot of those guys [Cuban exiles] in our house all the time, horseback riding with us through the CIA properties and neighboring farms. My father found houses for them around our house. He found jobs for them. He had close relations with them. But the ones he was closest to were the ones who had been with Fidel against Batista. A lot of the others were Batista people. The CIA didn’t like my father’s friends because they wanted people who took orders. The CIA wanted the killers from Batista’s circle and the mobsters. Daddy felt it was fair for us to help them fight their revolution with our training, like the French role during our revolution, but that it was their own revolution, we shouldn’t be doing it ourselves.
President Kennedy had a different attitude, especially after the Cuban missile crisis when he made friends with Khrushchev. He was wondering whether Castro was someone we could work with, and he sent many messengers to see Castro. He basically said we don’t care what kind of government you have, we just don’t want you to be a Soviet satellite and export revolution. His project was to change Latin American governance away from the right-wing families who just traded the presidencies among themselves. Up to that point it was to serve the mercantile interests of United Fruit and the oil companies, especially under Dulles.
If you look back, nobody knows when Castro made his choices. The history was essentially like that of [president Jacobo] Arbenz in Guatemala, when he nationalized United Fruit. It was a similar US policy in Cuba: keep the land idle, keep the cost of labor low, keep the cost of sugar and bananas up. The invasion was Nixon’s brainchild. They would get Standard Oil to shut its refinery in response to Fidel nationalizing. Fidel offered to pay them based on what their tax returns showed, just like Arbenz, same thing. In retaliation, Dulles got Standard to shut its refinery, so there was no oil coming into the country. At that point Fidel made the deal with the Soviets: Russian oil for Cuban sugar. That kind of forced him into the Soviet camp.
Jack understood all this, and sent that message with the French journalist, Jean Daniel. His attitude was we don’t care what they do as long as they aren’t in the Soviet camp and export revolution, because that would screw him politically with everybody. That’s what they were working toward [on the day the president was shot].
Daddy at first was only looking at how do we get rid of Castro. The story in my house was that the U-2 was shot down [on October 27] personally by Castro, that he had taken over the Soviet SAM site. That was my father’s focus.12
Afterward, though, my father recommended sending down James Donovan on the [Bay of Pigs] prisoners issues. [Donovan, who had been the general counsel of the Office of Strategic Services, predecessor to the CIA, negotiated the release of the American U-2 pilot]. My father sent down two of his aides, John Dolan and [John] Nolan, with Donovan, and they spent a lot of time with Fidel. They went to baseball games and saw how popular he was. Wherever he went, people would be cheering for him. On one of those trips, Fidel asked Donovan how diplomatic relations could be resumed, to which Donovan replied, “The way porcupines make love. Very carefully.”13 The view in the United States was that he was a drunken, murderous fanatic. When I met with him years later, that was still my impression too. My brother Max asked him once if he believed in God, and Fidel started talking about the stars and the planets and said anybody who studied the cosmos would be irrational if they did not believe in God.
So they were asking can we work with this guy. Bobby wrote to the president about more aggressive Mongoose operations, and Jack didn’t answer. Clearly he was reassessing Castro. When Dolan came back from Cuba in the summer of 1963 my father was aware that Jack was doing back channel with Castro. Che was going to be a problem, but you could work with Fidel. [After JFK’s death] Daddy went to Thomas Mann at State in 1964 and said we should reassess the embargo.14 He went to State Department briefings on Cuba and said we should reevaluate, and was never invited to another briefing again. He was shut out. He had had a wandering portfolio over many subjects, but then he was restricted [on Cuba].
Thus there was a tendency toward growing realism in the American elite among those who doubted whether the Cuban Revolution could be overthrown from within or without, forcing open a search for other options. Some would argue that this duality is nothing more than evidence of the “forked tongue” of the powerful at work. It is more the nature of statecraft, however, which often requires decision makers to consider the effectiveness of multiple options at the same time. Social movements and revolutionaries face the same challenges in reverse, whether to expect exclusion and coercion from the state or seize on concessions or openings on offer from the establishment. The complexity can be dizzying.
On April 21, 1963, JFK adviser McGeorge Bundy wrote a memo defining three “new initiatives” to be considered.15 The first two had been tried before: to use “all necessary means” to force a “noncommunist” government on Cuba, or to insist on “major but limited ends.” The third option was the new alternative being considered by the president: “The United States could move in the direction of gradual development of some form of accommodation with Castro.” That June, the administration’s “standing group” on Cuba also decided it would be useful to examine “various possibilities of establishing channels of communication with Castro.”16
In the months before he was shot, Kennedy’s administration was in a strategic reversal from its failed military policies toward Cuba. Many recent histories repeat essentially a similar story17 of a split between Kennedy and the CIA in 1963. Kennedy felt obliged to continue supporting the Cuban exiles who had survived the Bay of Pigs, while also quietly concluding that another invasion would not be viable. Nor would hit-and-run attacks, though he authorized more of them. Nor would there be an anti-Castro coup from within the Cuban military. Kennedy also had a political reason to maintain the anti-Castro posture, “as a shield against a political uproar in the United States.”18 Only a secretive and unorthodox approach, organized outside conventional channels, could test the possibilities. The administration had undermined its own diplomatic capacities by refusing to recognize the Castro government, a pattern that it would repeat.
In late 1961, Kennedy aide Richard Goodwin had encountered Che Guevara at the Organization of American States summit in Punta del Este, Uruguay, and, after a late-night confidential conversation, he told the president that Che was suggesting a “modus vivendi.”19 That notion was neither explored nor acted on, Goodwin told me years later. But in April 1963, word came back from Havana through Lisa Howard, the ABC newswoman, that Fidel wanted to improve relations. Howard, described by one journalist as “sexy, stylish . . . blond and curvy,”20 spent hours with Fidel on the night of April 21. She interviewed Fidel at length and rushed back to the United States, where she told the president of Fidel’s peace initiative. White House hawks considered trying to block the ABC interview, one internal memo arguing that “public airing in the United States of this interview would strengthen the arguments of ‘peace’ groups, ‘liberal’ thinkers, Commies, fellow travelers, and opportunistic political opponents of the present United States policy.”21 Then CIA director John McCone advised “the matter be handled in the most limited and sensitive manner,” and that “no active steps be taken on the rapprochement matter at this time.”22 At this time? McCone’s phrasing acknowledged that “the rapprochement matter” was being considered. The Lisa Howard interview went ahead, but there the process seemed to stall.
Shortly after, Lisa Howard sought out William Attwood, a veteran UN diplomat and former JFK classmate at Choate Rosemary Hall. Then an assistant to UN ambassador Adlai Stevenson, Attwood seized the initiative. Encouraged by an African diplomat at the UN, Attwood succeeded in gaining Cuban support for ultra-secret exploratory talks. Fidel even offered to meet Attwood at a private Cuban airfield, a plan that President Kennedy endorsed.23 As late as November 18, four days before JFK’s assassination, Fidel approved a preliminary meeting between Attwood and Cuba’s UN representative, Carlos Lechuga. On the same day—November 18—Kennedy gave a major speech on Cuba before the Inter-American Press Association, in Miami, aimed at pushing the secret process along. The two sides, while far apart, clearly were moving toward formal dialogue about coexistence. Interestingly, later interviews showed that both leaders were exploring the notion of accepting Fidel as “a Tito of the Caribbean,” that is, a non-aligned Communist leader.24 On October 17, Kennedy had welcomed Yugoslavia’s leader, Josef Broz Tito, to the White House, in a signal that the US government could be on friendly terms with a Communist and nationalist war hero independent of Moscow. If Tito, why not Fidel? The anger toward Kennedy rose from the Cuban right that wanted no coexistence whatsoever with Fidel. They objected sharply to the line inserted in Kennedy’s October 18 speech that pledged to prevent “another Cuba” in the hemisphere. The right wing realized that the president’s language hid a de facto acceptance of the existing Cuban government while warning only against “another” one, a hint at containment rather than rollback.
In the last weeks of his life, JFK saw Jean Daniel, the French journalist at L’Express, who was on his way to Havana to interview Fidel. Kennedy was eager to send a message through Daniel that “US policy . . . had created, built, and manufactured the Castro movement out of whole cloth without realizing it. . . . Batista was the incarnation of a number of sins on the part of the United States [and] now we shall have to pay for those sins.”25 Kennedy invited Daniel to visit the White House on his return because “Castro’s reactions interest me.”26 Daniel talked with Fidel for more than four hours late one night in Havana. Fidel indicated strongly to Daniel that Kennedy was someone he could have a dialogue with, because he was an “intimate enemy,” that is, Cuba and the American mainland were too intertwined by history and geography to come to war.27 He also hoped that Kennedy might become a great president, “the leader who may at last understand that there can be coexistence between capitalists and communists.”28
While the hidden “track” of third-party diplomacy through Daniel was in use, so too was the traditional one of subversion and destruction. On the very day that Daniel was conveying his message to Fidel and JFK was to die in Dallas, in Paris the CIA delivered a lethal device, disguised as a fountain pen, to a Cuban asset named Rolando Cubela meant for the assassination of Fidel. The CIA emissary Desmond Fitzgerald posed as a Senate friend of Bobby Kennedy, thus conveying the impression that the Kennedys wanted Fidel finished off. Cubela, whose CIA code name was “AM/LASH,” was an anticommunist former guerrilla fighter during the Cuban Revolution. He rejected the poison pen offer and, ultimately, nothing came of the plot.29
The November 22 meeting with AM/LASH (Cubela) in Paris was designed to leave the Kennedys in the dark. Years later, CIA director Richard Helms told Senate investigators that the Paris operation proceeded without White House authorization because “I [Helms] just thought this is exactly the kind of thing . . . he’s been asking us to do, let’s get on with doing it.”30 It appears in history’s hindsight that the Kennedys were unleashing demons they could not control when they chose to pursue the track of coexistence with Cuba.
The failure to officially recognize Cuba in any way also may have caused serious obstacles for any Kennedy initiative toward normalization. The contacts were essentially indirect—a casual meeting between Che and Goodwin, the encounter between Lisa Howard and Fidel, the drafting of Attwood to become involved, the suggestions of an African UN diplomat, the surreptitious visits of the Dolan, Nolan, Donovan group, the comments passed through Daniel, and so on. Few if any in the Kennedy administration had any real experience with Cuba or its revolution. Their thinking was influenced heavily by the Cuban exiles and military chieftains who wanted Fidel over-thrown. Congress and the headlines at the time followed Cold War ideology in lockstep. By contrast, during the 1962 missile crisis, the Kennedys found it possible to negotiate directly, if confidentially, with the long-serving Soviet ambassador, Anatoly Dobrynin. Though the United States and the Soviet Union were Cold War enemies, they exchanged ambassadors and, after the missile crisis, even built a direct hotline. Through urgent discussions, they drew conclusions over what signals from Washington or Moscow to believe. They resolved the missile crisis behind the backs of the Joint Chiefs and Soviet generals. In the case of Cuba, by contrast, there was no Dobrynin for Robert Kennedy to talk to. There was Lechuga, Fidel’s ambassador in New York, awaiting secret contacts about a projected discussion in the future, but one that could not be attended by any US officials directly. That was the vacuum in which James Donovan could go to ball games and fishing excursions with Fidel, in which Lisa Howard could engage him privately, all in circumvention of official channels. Over the subsequent fifty years, there repeatedly have been similar awkward efforts at indirect diplomacy but never a policy of direct diplomacy to manage the US-Cuban relationship.
The youthful Ricardo Alarcón might have made a modest contribution to conflict management through direct diplomacy during the turbulent two years between the Bay of Pigs, the missile crisis, and the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Instead Ricardo was assigned to be Cuba’s liaison to a new generation of revolutionaries in Central and Latin America.