Nation: Dousing a Popular Theory

"United States leaders should think that if they are aiding terrorist plans to eliminate Cuban leaders, they themselves will not be safe." This warning, voiced by Cuban President Fidel Castro just ten weeks before the assassination of John F. Kennedy, has long fed a theory that the Cuban leader was behind the killing of the President. Indeed, even Lyndon Johnson used to tell intimates that he blamed Cubans for Kennedy's death. Last week, the Castro connection was the chief topic of testimony before the House Select Committee on Assassinations from an all-star cast that included, remarkably, Castro, ex-CIA Director Richard Helms, former Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach and the three surviving members of the Warren Commission: former President Gerald Ford, former Kennedy Adviser John J. McCloy and former Senator John Sherman Cooper of Kentucky.

The 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 in New Orleans while passing out leaflets in support of a committee called Fair Play for Cuba.

The 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 have been here."

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."