Not in Your Lifetime: The Defining Book on the J.F.K. Assassination (23 page)

Viva Fidel?

“The fact that
Oswald was a member of this organization … the Fair Play for Cuba Committee … is a fact that can be viewed from many different ways.”

—Wesley Liebeler, Warren Commission lawyer assigned to Cuban aspects of the assassination

C
uba, of course, had first loomed as significant in Oswald’s life years earlier—before even his Soviet Russia period. There had been his shared enthusiasm—with his Marine Corps comrade Nelson Delgado—for the Castro revolution, his comment that he had made contact with Cuban diplomats, and the visit he had from a man Delgado believed was Cuban. Cuba—and whether Oswald’s public posture was genuine or part of a false front involving other schemers—is at the heart of the puzzles surrounding Oswald’s stay in New Orleans.

In the spring of 1963 in Dallas, days before leaving for New Orleans, Lee Harvey Oswald wrote a letter to the Fair Play for Cuba Committee (FPCC)—a pro-Castro organization headquartered in New York. In his unmistakable scrawl, peppered as it often was with the evidence of his mild dyslexia, Oswald reported:

“I stood yesterday for the first time in my life, with a placare around my neck, passing out fair play for
Cuba pamplets ect… . I was cursed as well as praised by some. My homemade placard said: Hands Off Cuba! Viva Fidel! I now ask for 40 or 50 more of the fine, basic pamplets.”

Indeed, two Dallas policemen would remember having seen a man standing on Main Street wearing a pro-Castro sign and handing out leaflets. A 1962 envelope, found among Oswald’s possessions after the assassination, would show that he had received correspondence from the FPCC since soon after his return from Russia. Documents, meanwhile, show that the FBI—which was intercepting the FPCC’s mail—was aware of Oswald’s letter to the group three days before he left for New Orleans. This may be very significant.

Once in New Orleans, Oswald took a job as maintenance man with a coffee production company, found an apartment, and summoned his wife, Marina, to come from Dallas to join him. Then, in late May, he embarked in earnest on the pro-Castro posturing that was to occupy the entire summer. In a new letter to the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, he said he was planning to set up a branch in New Orleans. He asked for advice on tactics, a bulk delivery of propaganda material, and application forms for the members he hoped to recruit. He confided, too, that he was “thinking about renting a small office at my own expense.” That detail was to take on special significance.

The director of the FPCC replied promptly and politely, advising caution. In overwhelmingly conservative New Orleans, he pointed out, pro-Castro efforts faced serious obstacles. The director warned Oswald against provoking “unnecessary incidents which frighten away prospective supporters.”
Oswald was to ignore the advice. Pro-Castro agitation was so important and pressing for him, it seemed, that he did not even wait for the response from New York or for the literature he had requested. He appeared to have his own plan and purpose.

Within days, according to the Warren Commission, he was at the Jones Printing Company near his place of work, ordering a thousand copies of a leaflet in support of Castro.
1
He used the name “Osborne” when placing the order, and again days later, at Mailer’s Service Company, to order five hundred application forms for prospective FPCC members and three hundred membership cards. Copies of the leaflets were to survive their distribution. Some bore Oswald’s own name and address and—on occasion—his post-office box number but a different name, “Hidell.” There, too, in the space for “President” on one of the New Orleans FPCC cards, was the handwritten name “A. J. Hidell”—the name in which the infamous Mannlicher-Carcano had been ordered.
2
According to an officer who testified to the Assassinations Committee, an Army Intelligence file would be opened—while Oswald was in New Orleans—under the names Oswald and Hidell.

The FPCC “chapter” in New Orleans was entirely fictional. Lee Oswald was the sole member of a group that existed only on paper, but it was a role he exploited to the full. He wrote to
The Worker
, the Communist newspaper to which he had long subscribed, enclosing “honorary membership” cards for Gus Hall and Benjamin Davis, the leaders of the American Communist Party. Then he sallied forth to tout the Castro cause in public.

On June 16, Oswald was seen on the dock at the port of New Orleans, handing out pro-Castro leaflets to sailors from an aircraft carrier, the USS
Wasp
. Like the previous propaganda distribution in Dallas, this effort quickly fizzled. Alerted by a passing naval officer, a policeman ordered Oswald to leave.

Then, for nearly two months it was as if his feverish preparations, the accumulation of a mass of propaganda, had all been for nothing, as though Lee Oswald had lost interest in Cuba. He read a lot, but books about communism were in a minority. A later FBI check on Oswald’s library visits would show that he dabbled in everything from
Everyday Life in Ancient Rome
and
Hornblower and the Hotspur
to James Bond, Aldous Huxley, and science fiction. He also read
Profiles
in
Courage
, by John F. Kennedy, and a new book about Kennedy,
Portrait of a President
. The Kennedy books, however, were just two of twenty-seven books Oswald read that summer. He read no library books at all about Cuba.

In July, Oswald went with his uncle Charles Murret to a Jesuit seminary in Mobile, Alabama, where his cousin Eugene was studying. At the cousin’s request, he gave a talk on his experiences in the Soviet Union in which he made clear that Soviet-style communism was in his view a dismal failure. Life in Russia, Oswald said, was not for him. Meanwhile, to others, he was asserting exactly the opposite.

Privately, both Oswald and his wife had been keeping up their correspondence with the Soviet Embassy in Washington, DC, supposedly still planning the return to Russia that had first been mooted in Dallas. Both asked for visas, although the correspondence suggests Oswald wanted Marina to go back to Russia by herself.

Oswald the Castro activist, meanwhile, had merely been put on ice. In August, three months before the Kennedy assassination, he again leaped purposefully into action. From this moment on, nobody could fail to
remember Lee Oswald and his loyalty to Fidel Castro. What follows is the conventional account.

On August 5, Oswald ventured into what was supposedly the enemy camp. He paid a visit to a New Orleans store owned by Carlos Bringuier, a fanatically anti-Castro militant playing an active role in the struggle to remove Castro. According to Bringuier and his companions, Oswald came in unannounced, struck up a conversation, and posed as a friend of the exiles. He presented himself, they would allege later, as a Marine Corps veteran who had experience in guerrilla warfare and was willing to train exiles, even take part in the armed struggle against Castro.

The following day, the exiles’ story goes, Oswald was back at the store again, still trumpeting the very opposite of his usual pro-Castro creed. This time, he left a Marine Corps manual as proof of his qualifications, and departed repeating his desire to fight Castro. Then, just three days later, he turned up in downtown New Orleans, coolly handing out
pro
-Castro leaflets (see Photos 18, 19).

Carlos Bringuier, supposedly tipped off by a friend, angrily accosted Oswald in the city center. The Cuban harangued passersby, telling them how Oswald the Communist had earlier deceitfully offered support to the exiles. A crowd gathered, and Bringuier made a great show of losing his temper with Oswald. Things appeared to turn ugly, and the police intervened. Oswald, along with Bringuier and two of his friends, was taken to a police station and charged with disturbing the peace.

The officers at the police station sensed something phony, and their comments are interesting. Lieutenant Francis Martello was to say of Oswald, “He seemed to have them set up to create an incident.” Sergeant
Horace Austin, for his part, said that Oswald “appeared as though he is being used by these people and [was] very uninformed.” Who, though, was using whom?

A rational explanation is that Oswald deliberately provoked a dispute as part of a scheme to establish his credentials as a Castro supporter more firmly—and his subsequent actions were to support that idea. Oswald was now engaged in advertisements for himself.

The day after the clash with the exiles, Oswald approached the city editor of the
States-Item
newspaper, cajoling him to give more coverage to the FPCC campaign. Three days later, he reportedly went so far as to telephone a prominent New York radio journalist, Long John Nebel, offering to appear on Nebel’s radio show at his own expense.

Then, exactly a week after the incident involving the exiles, Oswald contrived another scene in the street. On the morning of August 16, he went to the waiting room of a state employment office and offered two dollars each to anyone who would help him hand out leaflets, “for a few minutes at noon.” He found a recruit, a student named Charles Steele, and—along with another man who has never been identified—they duly passed out pro-Castro leaflets outside the International Trade Mart.

The leafleting lasted only a few minutes, but in that brief space of time, Oswald’s demonstration was filmed by a unit from the local TV station WDSU. The pictures survive, haunting images of a slender, clean-cut young man, a hint of a smile on his lips, diffidently dispensing propaganda to passersby. Oswald’s effort brought the publicity he was courting.

Within a day, a local radio station broadcast an interview with him about
Cuba and the FPCC. A few days after that, he took part in a lengthy broadcast debate about Cuba. The debate was a spirited duel with Ed Butler, director of a virulently anti-communist organization called the Information Council of the Americas, and Carlos Bringuier, the anti-Castro exile who had been Oswald’s principal opponent in the street fracas. Oswald handled himself well and was articulate. His opponents, though, had somehow found out about Oswald’s defection to the Soviet Union, and the main effect of the program was to expose Oswald as a Communist.

Then Oswald’s public pro-Castro activity ended again. He would never again venture out in support of the Castro regime. He did not need to, for now he was indelibly stamped as a Castro militant. Oswald had successfully carried out part of some sort of a plan. But what plan?

The Warren Commission was to offer one rationale. Oswald was preoccupied with hopes of getting to Cuba, the Commission thought, and his antics in New Orleans were perhaps aimed at acquiring ideological qualifications that would make him acceptable to Havana. On its face, the evidence available at the time seemed to support that conclusion. In the period between the New Orleans phase and the assassination, Oswald was—as we shall see—to go through the motions of trying to get clearance from the Cubans to go to Havana. First appearances, though may well deceive.

Telltale clues, few of them known to the first official inquiry, may suggest Oswald was part of a covert intelligence scheme that involved Cuba and was designed to
discredit
supporters of the Castro regime. Consider again the story of Oswald’s New Orleans FPCC campaign.

* * *

On August 1,
Oswald mailed a new letter to the FPCC in which he reported his energetic activity in aid of the Castro cause. In this progress report—complete with the customary spelling errors—Oswald wrote, “Through the efforts of some exial ‘gusanos’ [an abusive nickname for anti-Castro militants, meaning “worms”] a street demonstration was attacked and we were officially cautioned by police. This incident robbed me of what support I had leaving me alone. Nevertheless thousands of circulars were distrubed and many, many pamplets which your office supplied.”

Oswald was telling the story of the incident in which he had clashed with his supposed natural rivals, the anti-Castro militants of New Orleans. There is just one problem. No such incident is known to have occurred until almost a week
after
Oswald reported it to the FPCC. Was the whole episode as phony as Oswald’s prophetic letter?

The confrontation with the exiles sounds oddly stagy. By Carlos Bringuier’s account, when he and his cronies cursed Oswald and threw some of his leaflets up in the air, Oswald’s reaction was to smile. Bringuier was to say he then took off his glasses and prepared to hit Oswald. Oswald went on smiling and said, “Okay, Carlos, if you want to hit me, hit me.” There was no fight. Later, after all the participants had been charged with disturbing the peace, the case came up in the municipal court. In a decision that may say something about the conservative attitudes of New Orleans in 1963, Oswald was fined ten dollars while charges against Bringuier and his associates, the people who had actually started the fracas, were dismissed.

That scenario is odd but possible. What sticks in the throat is Bringuier’s account of Oswald’s behavior a couple of days before the incident—his
contradictory visit to offer his services as a military instructor to the anti-Castro side. Had this been a deliberate move to draw attention to himself, to provoke the exiles into attacking his impending street demonstration? This is really the only explanation that even begins to resolve the contradiction. In the end, however, it does not bear scrutiny.

Oswald could not have known the approach to the exiles would bear fruit, that one of their number would—just by luck—happen to notice his pro-Castro leafleting, call reinforcements, and make a counter-demonstration. The implausibility of the visit to Bringuier’s store, coupled to the fact that Oswald apparently reported the incident to the FPCC before it occurred, suggests the whole affair may have been a charade. If so, what purpose did it serve?

The conventional explanation—that the incident was rigged to give Oswald impressive pro-Castro credentials—may be half the answer. The other half, usually ignored, is that the FPCC incident was a solid propaganda coup for the
anti
-Castro side. First there was the street encounter itself, when Bringuier was able to “expose” Oswald as a “traitor to this country,” a man who had tried to double-cross the exiles. Then, with attention once attracted by the arrests and the subsequent court case, there was an excuse for the real propaganda show—the broadcasts on radio and television. Now, before a large audience, FPCC’s New Orleans representative could be dramatically exposed as a Marxist convert who had defected to Russia. Bringuier, moreover, who was ever eager to resort to Congress’ Committee on Un-American Activities, then called on his supporters to ask their congressmen for a full investigation of the treacherous Communist Lee Oswald.