Fidel Castro and the Kennedys

Eternally Entwined by History 
***Essay updated: Friday, November 28th, 2014***

       Spain's leading newspaper, El Pais, is reporting that the United States this week asked Spain's Foreign Minister, Juan Manuel Garcia-Margallo, to deliver a special overture or message on behalf of the United States to Cuba's designated post-Castro leader Miguel Diaz-Canel. The request was reportedly made prior to Garcia-Margallo's trip to Cuba this week. Presumably, the U. S. wanted to convey to Cuba, specifically Mr. Diaz-Canel, that President Barack Obama plans to ease sanctions against the island prior to the Summit of the Americas that will be held in Panama next April. Cuban-Americans in the U. S. Congress, especially Senator Marco Rubio from Miami, have reacted viciously to mere rumors of President Obama's plans, and that was before the leading European newspaper, El Pais, indicated that the Spanish Foreign Minister, Mr. Garcia-Margallo, was delivering a very special and important U. S. message to Cuba this week.

         This AP/Ramon Espinosa photo was taken Tuesday {Nov. 25-2014} in Havana and it shows Cuba's Foreign Minister Bruno Rodriguez, in the white Guayabera shirt, greeting Spain's Foreign Minister Jose Manuel Garcia-Margallo, who is on a three-day visit. Garcia-Margallo is urging Cuba to accelerate its economic reforms by emphasizing private enterprise and foreign investment and he asked Cuba to allow former political prisoners to leave the island. Cuba, Garcia-Margallo noted, is paying attention to such suggestions. However, the nearby United States, still shackled by a Cuban policy dictated by a second generation of visceral Cuban-exiles, remains the one nation in the world that has no positive influence in Cuba although it is the nation that should be exercising the most influence. Garcia-Margallo this week urged Cuba to attend the Ibero-American Summit of Spanish and Portuguese-speaking nations to be held in Veracruz, Mexico in December. The AP reported that soon after Garcia-Margallo arrived in Havana Tuesday, the Spaniard understandably asked to meet with Miguel Diaz-Canel. The request was granted.

        The 54-year-old Miguel Diaz-Canel, not someone named Castro, has already been designated as Cuba's post-Castro leader. Fidel Castro turned 88 in August; Raul Castro turns 84 in June. Major countries, like Spain this week, are thus anxious to get a feel for Miguel Diaz-Canel and also judge Cuba's ongoing economic reforms. Of course, a rich and powerful contingent of Cuban-Americans will not permit the United States of America to have such freedom to check out Diaz-Canel or Cuban reforms. Sadly, it has been that way in the United States since the Kennedy administration way, way back in the early 1960s.

       The saga of America's Kennedy brothers, Robert and John, will for eternity be tightly entwined with Fidel Castro, Cuba's legendary rebel. John Kennedy is America's most famous and most beloved President. During the truncated JFK presidency (1960 till 1963}, his Attorney General and primary adviser was his younger brother Robert. John was assassinated in Dallas on November 22, 1963, barely a thousand days into what would have been two presidential terms. Robert was assassinated in Los Angeles in June, 1968 as he was waging a very serious campaign to become President of the United States. When the Kennedy brothers took over the White House in January of 1960, they inherited from the Eisenhower-Nixon administration a powerful, no-holds-barred CIA and State Department program that called for both the overthrow and the assassination of Cuba's Fidel Castro, whose Cuban Revolution had amazingly overthrown the U. S. and Mafia-backed Batista dictatorship in Cuba a year earlier. The Kennedy brothers carried through with that anti-Castro program with excessive vigor and unabashed exuberance. Robert himself directed repeated attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro, often utilizing Cuban exile-CIA agents who were, beginning in January of 1959, sent to the secretive Army of the Americas at Fort Benning, Georgia where they were explicitly trained in the use of weapons, explosives, and sabotage. Those anti-Castro Cuban exiles who graduated from the Army of the Americas as Second Lieutenants included the infamous assassin-terrorist Luis Posada Carriles who, thanks to his powerful friends in Miami and Washington, was freed from a Venezuelan prison where he was charged with blowing up the civilian Cubana Flight 455 airplane killing all 73 on board and he was later, thanks again to his powerful friends in Miami and Washington, freed from a Panamanian prison where he had been sentenced for a botched assassination attempt against Fidel Castro on Panamanian soil. Today at age 86 Posada is a very free man in Miami, much to the chagrin of all Caribbean and Latin American countries; and at age 88 Fidel Castro is still alive in Havana, much to the chagrin of two generations of visceral Cuban exiles. While Robert Kennedy was orchestrating assassination attempts against Fidel, President John Kennedy was signing off on the Bay of Pigs military attack in April of 1961, all of which turned out to be counter-intuitive because they didn't kill or overthrow Fidel and, in fact, greatly enhanced both his long life and his legacy as a revolutionary, anti-imperialist icon. The Fidel-Posada nexus is an indelible part of the history of Cuba and the United States, as is the synergy or lack thereof between Fidel and the Kennedy brothers. As you reflect on the photo at the top of this essay, perhaps the most important element in the Castro-Kennedy saga is this coda: Just days before his assassination in November of 1963 President Kennedy told several of his closest associates, including Pierre Salinger, that the biggest mistake of his life was his "treatment"  of Cuba; and just days before his assassination in June of 1968 Robert Kennedy told several of his closest associates, including his wife Ethel, that the biggest mistake of his political life was his "treatment" of Cuba. Robert Kennedy also confirmed that President Kennedy, in the first two weeks of November, 1963 just prior to his fateful trip to Dallas, had told all of his closest aides that his "top priority" was to normalize relations with Cuba. When President Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas on Nov. 22-1963 early suspicion focused on assassin Lee Harvey Oswald being an agent for Fidel Castro coupled with stark reminders that JFK had ordered Fidel's assassination and it was logical that Fidel would respond in kind. Robert, the man most intent on unraveling the intimate details of the assassination, called Havana and spoke directly to Fidel, who invited Robert to send "your best investigators to Havana to interrogate me." Robert did. Fidel provided the investigators insightful, documented evidence uncovered by Cuba's well-respected intelligence operatives who, quite naturally, had kept keen eyes on the most zealous anti-Castro Cuban exiles -- such as Posada Carriles and Orlando Bosch -- and the most zealous anti-Castro Mafia figures, such as Carlos Marcello in New Orleans and Santo Trafficante in Tampa. Additionally, as Robert's interrogators took written and audio notes, Fidel said, "If I was totally stupid I would have been eliminated long ago. I would have been totally stupid if I in any way had been involved in the assassination of John Kennedy. I never communicated with him directly but in recent weeks I had daily reports from Celia Sanchez and American newscaster Lisa Howard who had reached agreements with President Kennedy about establishing friendly relations between our two countries." Robert Kennedy himself corroborated Fidel's statements and the intelligence Fidel provided. Robert came to believe that Oswald did not act alone and Robert concluded that various elements -- the CIA, Cuban exiles, the Mafia, and even key associates of Lyndon Johnson -- had all targeted his brother, the President, for assassination. But, yes, he exonerated Fidel Castro.

       The life and death of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, America's 35th President {1960-1963}, are the two most recorded and publicized events in American history. He was born on May 29, 1917 in Brookline, Massachusetts, and was assassinated a thousand days into his presidency on November 22, 1963, in Dallas, Texas. To this day, the saga of John Kennedy is known worldwide and his initials, JFK, are America's best known initials, surpassing all others including Franklin Delano Roosevelt's FDR, America's only 4-time President. As with many other major events related to both American history and topicality since the 1950s, Cuba's Fidel Castro happens to be indelibly tied to both the life and the death of John Fitzgerald Kennedy whose assassination in 1963 still evokes massive coverage. For example, last weekend -- November 22-23, 2014 -- CNN showed worldwide a one-hour documentary entitled: "The Sixties: The Assassination of President Kennedy." As with most other accounts, the CNN documentary referenceed Revolutionary Cuba's dominance of the Kennedy presidency, including the fact that JFK authorized multiple assassination attempts against Fidel Castro and that JFK authorized the Bay of Pigs attack on Cuba in April of 1961. Also, of course, many right-wing politicians and journalists instantly blamed Fidel Castro, as a logical form of retaliation, for the assassination of John Kennedy...and many still make that claim. However, history as well as the Kennedy family itself have long-since absolved Fidel Castro of that connection to JFK, although Cuba's highly respected intelligence operatives maintained close tabs on the prime enemies of both Fidel Castro and John Kennedy. Those enemies were easily defined and interconnected, such as the Cuban exiles and Mafia kingpins from the Batista dictatorship and the CIA.

             Of course, in 1962 during the second year of the Kennedy presidency, by far the three most famous people in the world were Cuba's Fidel Castro, the Soviet Union's Nikita Khrushchev, and America's John Kennedy. Eight days in October of 1962 are still remembered as the closest the world has ever come to a total nuclear holocaust, caused when the U. S. discovered that the Soviet Union had installed deadly nuclear missiles in Cuba, barely a hundred miles from the coast of Florida. At the time Sergei Khrushchev was an aide to his father Nikita and at his side during those eight historic days. Later Sergei became an American citizen, a respected historian, and an American professor. Sergei wrote that of the three catalysts as the world held its collective breath, Fidel Castro was the most dominant. Why? Because Sergei said his father and Kennedy were "shaking in their boots" and anxious for the standoff to end while Fidel, in Havana, wanted to fight while Cuba had nuclear missiles to offset America's nuclear arsenal. Sergei, who would know, said Nikita Khrushchev ordered his commanders in Cuba not to fire on U. S. spy planes flying over the island because that might precipitate the holocaust. But, as Sergei and other historians well know, a spy plane piloted by Rudy Anderson was shot out of the sky by a SAM missile, killing Anderson. That was the moment, Sergei says, when his father and Kennedy were in contact with each other via cables and "shaking in their boots." In recent years de-classified Russian documents as well as the Russian submarine commander confirm that the submarine came within seconds of firing a nuclear missile at an American ship during a crucial day when President Kennedy was holding back war-mongers in his administration and in Congress who were insisting that he initiate a nuclear attack against Cuba. Such revelations, supported by de-classified data, still credit John Kennedy with preventing a nuclear disaster with urgent negotiations with Moscow, including the secretive promise that the U. S. would never attack Cuba and that U. S. nuclear missiles in Turkey aimed at Russia would be dismantled if the Cuban missiles were also removed. The assassination attempts against Castro, repeated coastal terrorist attacks on Cuba by Miami-based planes and speed-boats, the Bay of Pigs military attack in 1961, the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, etc., totally dominated John Kennedy's first two years as President. By his third year in office, 1963, President Kennedy had come to believe that elements inside the CIA and the Mafia, as well as Cuban exiles in Miami and their acolytes in the U. S. Congress, superseded Fidel Castro and Revolutionary Cuba as his prime enemies. It is believed those were President Kennedy's thoughts as he deplaned in Dallas.

       Photos of President Kennedy and his beautiful wife Jacqueline in Dallas on November 22, 1963 remain indelibly engraved in the psyche of Americans. Most historians agree that President Kennedy's monumental assassination was indeed tied to U.S.-Cuban relations, specifically JFK being blamed by Cuban exiles, the Mafia, and the CIA for the disastrous Bay of Pigs attack on Cuba in April of 1961, an ill-conceived and cowardly attack that, instead of killing/overthrowing Castro, greatly enhanced his statue and legacy. Famed Mafia lawyer Frank Ragano confirmed that his prime clients -- Mafia kingpins Carlos Marcello and Santo Trafficante Jr. -- had targeted both Kennedy Brothers -- John and Robert -- for assassinations and that, indeed, Jimmy Hoffa had sent $50,000 in cash from Detroit to Miami to help cover the expenses. These were the Kennedy brothers that, in the last weeks of their lives before John's assassination in 1963 and Robert's assassination in 1968, had lamented to intimates that their biggest political mistake was following up on the Eisenhower-Nixon programs designed to assassinate Castro.

          This photo is a tip-off on how the Kennedy family, the most famous and most beloved family in American history, ended up thinking about Fidel Castro and Cuba. On the left in the middle you will recognize Fidel Castro, often called the most recognizable person in the world. Sitting directly across from Fidel, and engaging in a conversation with the Cuban icon, is John Kennedy Jr., the awesomely handsome and popular son of the late President John Kennedy. John Jr. had talked on the phone several times with Fidel, assuring Fidel that no one in the Kennedy family, including his uncle Robert, blamed him "for what happened" in Dallas because "we came to realize that your association with it was crafted by more sinister people in my father's world." It was registered at this dinner table in Havana that Fidel replied with these words spoken in English: "It is so nice of you to come to my country and say those words to me, John. My admiration of your father has increased over the years and I will never forget, in the last weeks of his young life, what he was trying to do for Cuba even though he was aware of the people it would infuriate."

         On his trip to Cuba to meet Fidel Castro, John Kennedy Jr. brought along several friends, including Inigo Thomas, the Editor of John Jr.'s magazine "George" that was named after George Washington. Out in the hallway before dinner John Jr. introduced Thomas to Fidel, as depicted in the above photo. On Nov. 22-2013 {on the 50th anniversary of the JFK assassination} Inigo Thomas wrote a long article that is still readily available Online with the above photo that Mr. Thomas still cherishes. Thomas began that article with these words: "From the summer of 1996 until he died in July of 1999, I worked for John Kennedy Jr. at his monthly glossy magazine George." Thomas' article led with the above photo and, decades after it was taken, he seems still mesmerized by Fidel Castro's warmth and candidness. At one point, for example, Fidel mentioned to Thomas that, "Lee Harvey Oswald tried to get to Cuba." Thomas will also always remember that, on that trip to Cuba, John Kennedy Jr. asked Fidel Castro if he would take him to the Bay of Pigs site, the place so indelible in the historic lives of both Fidel Castro and John Kennedy. Fidel readily agreed. The Bay of Pigs military attack on Cuba in April of 1961, most historians believe, figured prominently in the assassination of John Kennedy and in the longevity of Fidel Castro and the Cuban Revolution.

  This map shows the location of the Bay of Pigs, which Cuba calls Playa Giron.

Fidel, by request, took John Jr. to this very spot at the Bay of Pigs.

       This is how the Bay of Pigs {Playa Giron} looks today {Photo courtesy: www.moxon.net}. On his visit to Cuba to see Fidel Castro, John Kennedy Jr. took an invigorating half-hour swim at this very spot.

         In American history, this is one of the most memorable and saddest images that will forever be engraved in the hearts of Americans. It shows the two-year-old John Kennedy Jr. saluting the caisson-drawn casket that carried his father, President John Kennedy, to Arlington National Cemetery.

        John Kennedy Jr. is shown here with his wife Carolyn Bessette. Both of them, along with Carolyn's older sister Lauren, were killed in 1999 when the airplane John Jr. was piloting crashed off the Massachusetts coast. In Cuba, Fidel Castro often talked to the Cuban people on the island's most popular television program, "The Roundtable," which is hosted by Randy Alonso. When he got confirmation of the fatal plane crash, a distraught Fidel Castro told The Roundtable viewers: "I have sad news to tell you tonight. A fine young American, along with his wife and her sister, has died in a plane crash into the ocean above New York. His name is John Kennedy Jr., the promising son of the former President." Fidel then held a photo of him and John Jr. together in Cuba. "John Jr. was my friend, and Cuba's friend," he said. "I will miss him. And I will always wonder about what greatness we have lost but will never realize. I don't cry but I cried in 1980 and I cried today." Cubans watching that telecast in 1999 well knew that Fidel Castro's reference to "1980" pertained to the day Celia Sanchez died of cancer; but he spent the bulk of that program telling the Cubans about his friend, John Kennedy Jr. That friendship is just one of the many interesting aspects in the history of both Cuba and the United States, and it is an aspect that Americans generally do not consider. 

          John Kennedy Jr. was born on November 25, 1960 in Washington and died on July 16, 1999 in the Atlantic Ocean near the Kennedy compound at Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts. So, if he were alive today he would be 53-years-old and, perhaps, the President of the United States of America. John Kennedy Jr. was even better looking and just as charismatic as his father. He would have probably been a good, maybe great, President. But fate, specifically the crash of a small airplane, unkindly intervened.

       Kathleen Kennedy Townsend was the very first of Bobby and Ethel Kennedy's 11 children. She was born in Greenwich, Connecticut 63 years ago -- on July 4th, 1956. Kathleen Kennedy, a lawyer, was the Lt. Governor of Maryland from 1995 till 2003 and she was an unsuccessful candidate for Governor of Maryland in 2002. In 2009 she wrote an impassioned Op-Ed column in the Washington Post asking President Barack Obama to ease all of the sanctions against Cuba. Fidel Castro, a voracious newshound, was touched by the article when he read it in Mexico's La Jornada newspaper. The next day -- April 24, 2009 -- Fidel penned a long article that was published in the top two Cuban newspapers and is still available online at globalresearch.org. In that article he mentioned that other Kennedy family members, including John Kennedy Jr., had also reached out kindly to him, and he was appreciative of the Kathleen Kennedy Op-Ed in the Washington Post. Fidel added: "I confess that many times I have meditated on the dramatic story of John F. Kennedy. It was my fate to live through the era when he was the greatest and most dangerous adversary of the Revolution. He saw himself as the representative of a new generation of Americans who were confronting the old-style dirty politicians, men of the sort of Nixon whom he had defeated with a tremendous display of political talent. Because he was over-confident, he was dragged into the Bay of Pigs adventure by his predecessors." Fidel ended that article with these exact words: "A worthy article by Kathleen Kennedy."

          JFK Jr.'s father, President John Kennedy, was Fidel Castro's bitter enemy, at least until the final weeks of his life when he concluded that his and America's primary enemies were all around him in America, not on the nearby island of Cuba. President Kennedy, in fact, one day famously exclaimed: "If I could I would blow the CIA to smithereens!" Before and after the all-too-brief Kennedy presidency, it was the practice of Republican administrations to give vicious anti-Castro Cubans in Miami access to the Oval Office in the White House. One day, President Kennedy greeted and shook hands with a line of visitors. Later he was told that one of them was Rolando Masferrer, the infamously cruel enforcer for the ousted Batista dictatorship and one of many Batista leaders that regrouped in South Florida and formed anti-Castro paramilitary units. When an aide later told President Kennedy he had just shaken hands with Rolando Masferrer, he went ballistic according to several of his key aides, including famed historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. It was around that time that President Kennedy began telling his top aides -- Pierre Salinger, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., etc. -- that, upon his return from Dallas, his and their primary goal would be to "normalize relations with Cuba." That decision was well know to his enemies -- the Cuban exiles, the Mafia, the CIA, and some of Vice President Lyndon Johnson's top aides. Also, the scheduled stops on his southern trip that culminated in Dallas were well known. Moreover, it was well known, to the FBI and others, that President Kennedy's plans to normalize relations with Cuba greatly exacerbated the plans to kill him. It is almost certain that if the Cuban issue did not directly predicate the murder of President Kennedy, it is only because killers with other motives accomplished the deed first. And perhaps most significant of all, since the assassination of President John Kennedy on November 22, 1963, no American president has had the courage to diligently try to normalize relations with Cuba in the face of the opposition that President Kennedy so bravely confronted just prior to his final trip, the one to Dallas.

Fidel Castro and John Kennedy
Entwined Titans of Cuban and American History 
By the way...............

.............................this is a recent photo of Tete Puebla, a General in the Cuban army. Sitting in the middle is Tete's best friend Nidia Sarabia, a distinguished Cuban researcher and historian. On the left is Cuba's Culture Minister Julian Gonzalez.

        By the time she was 15-years-old Tete Puebla was a superstar guerrilla fighter in the all-female "Mariana Grajales Platoon" that played a major role in Cuba's Revolutionary War against the Batista dictatorship. This book tells their story, including Tete's graphic explanation of how the extreme brutality of Batista's dreaded Masferrer Tigers turned her into a do-or-die teenage female guerrilla fighter.

Fidel Castro has always been a great admirer of General Tete Puebla.

General Tete Puebla is still revered by Cuban citizens and journalists.

       This is General Tete Puebla's favorite photo. That's her on the left the day she and other members of the Mariana Grajales Platoon arrived in Havana in the first week of January, 1959, after they helped defeat the Batista-Mafia dictatorship. Celia Sanchez, Haydee Santamaria, Vilma Espin, Melba Hernandez, Marta Rojas, Tete Puebla, Eloisa Ballester, Lilia Rielo...in all of history there has never been a female-powered revolution to match the Cuban Revolution. General Tete Puebla personifies that historic fact. General Tete Puebla said, "When this photograph was taken, my only regret was that Batista, the Mafia, and especially the Masferrer Tigers had not stayed in Havana long enough to fight us. That would have been fun, like kicking their asses in the Sierra Maestra was fun." Well, as a key Cuban General, she is still around in case they return.

******************************