Reclaiming History (290 page)

And Daniel was having lunch with Castro at Castro’s modest summer home in the resort town of Varadero Beach at one-thirty (Cuban time) on the afternoon of the assassination. When the telephone rang thereafter and a secretary in guerrilla garb informed Castro that Mr. Dortico, president of the Cuban Republic, had an urgent communication for him, “Fidel picked up the phone,” Daniel writes, “and I heard him say: ‘Como? Um a tentado?’ (‘What’s that? An attempted assassination?’) He then turned to us to say that Kennedy had just been struck down in Dallas. Then he went back to the telephone and exclaimed in a loud voice ‘Herido? Muy gravemente?’ (‘Wounded? Very seriously?’) He came back, sat down and repeated three times the words: ‘Es uno mala noticia.’ (‘This is bad news.’)” When the news finally came in of Kennedy’s death, Castro lamented to Daniel, “At least Kennedy was an enemy to whom we had become accustomed. This is a serious matter, an extremely serious matter.”
⁵²

In his televised speech to the Cuban people on the evening of November 23, the night following the assassination, Castro suggested that “ultra-conservative circles” were behind the assassination, and that these circles were responsible for seeking to put the blame on him. “The information about Lee H. Oswald is a Machiavellian plan against Cuba. Oswald never had contacts with us. We have never heard of him. [He would later learn about Oswald coming to the Cuban consulate in Mexico City.] But in the dispatches he’s always presented as a Castro Communist.”
⁵³

T
hree separate, independent bodies investigated the possibility of Cuban complicity in Kennedy’s murder. In 1964, the Warren Commission concluded it could find “no evidence” that Cuba was “involved in the assassination of President Kennedy.”
⁵⁴
In 1976, the Church Committee said it had “seen no evidence that Fidel Castro or others in the Cuban Government plotted Kennedy’s assassination in retaliation for U.S. operations against Cuba.”
⁵⁵
And in 1979, the HSCA concluded that “the Cuban Government was not involved in the assassination of President Kennedy.”
⁵⁶
Wherever President Johnson is today, he should defer to this collective judgment.

It has been my experience in the prosecution of criminal cases that in virtually every complex murder case, there is at least one event or the testimony of one witness that does not fit comfortably into the mosaic of the known facts. Such is the case with the Sylvia Odio incident in the Kennedy assassination, in which Miss Odio said Oswald and two Cubans visited her at her apartment in Dallas in late September of 1963, and one of the Cubans told her the following day of Oswald’s reference to the desirability of Kennedy being assassinated. Conspiracy theorists have long pointed to the Odio incident as powerful evidence of a conspiracy in the assassination. Indeed, Warren Commission assistant counsel Wesley Liebeler said that at the time the Warren Commission submitted its final report in September of 1964, “I did not have any other…line of investigation that I wanted to pursue and I don’t know that anyone else on the staff did either” except for the Sylvia Odio incident.

HSCA deputy chief counsel Gary Cornwell: “The Sylvia Odio incident was never resolved to your satisfaction, was it?”

Liebeler: “No, not really.”
¹

I had learned that before defense attorney Gerry Spence and I got involved in the London docu-trial, Mark Redhead had visited Odio, who was living in Washington, D.C., seeking to have her testify at the trial, and she was disinclined to do so. However, he intended to make a further effort. I knew, of course, that even if she eventually agreed (which she did not), as with all witnesses the final determination of whether she would be called to the stand would be made by Spence or me.

When I first read about the Odio incident during my preparation for trial, I was deeply troubled. As previously pointed out, whether Oswald was or was not a part of a conspiracy would not be an issue for the jury to resolve at the trial, and Spence would be presenting evidence against his own client to suggest that Oswald was. Judge Lucius Bunton had agreed to give my offered instruction that if the jurors, though it was not their burden, nonetheless concluded that Oswald was part of a conspiracy, under the law they must (even if they believed he was not the actual killer) return a verdict of guilty. This is so because of the vicarious liability theory of conspiracy, which holds that each member of a conspiracy is criminally responsible for all crimes committed by his co-conspirators in pursuance of the objective of the conspiracy. However, any belief by the jury in the existence of a conspiracy could only spell problems for me, because all the evidence I intended to present to prove Oswald’s guilt, without exception, showed Oswald always acting alone in his deadly mission. Therefore, if, for whatever reason, the jury smelled a conspiracy, this could only serve to diminish my credibility in their eyes. More importantly, the complicity of others was incompatible with the thrust of my case, and could reasonably cause the jury to question the validity of all or at least some of the evidence I was presenting against Oswald. In other words, if the jurors ultimately came to conclude that there was a conspiracy, it might raise a reasonable doubt in their mind as to whether Oswald had, in fact, killed Kennedy, since it may have been another member of the conspiracy who had pulled the trigger. So the Odio incident took on great importance in my eyes. And despite the countless claims of conspiracy by the conspiracy theorists throughout the years, it remains a fact that the Odio incident, if true, was, and continues to be, the only event where Oswald is put allegedly in the company of a mysterious companion (here, two) shortly before the assassination, and where he allegedly uttered the desirability of Kennedy’s murder in the presence of at least one other person.

T
he Cuban regime that preceded Fidel Castro was that of Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista, which the United States had supported for years. It was widely reviled for its corruption, enabling Castro to rise to power with the support of not only the poor
*
and the nation’s youth but also most of the middle class and even many of the rich, including Sylvia Odio’s family. Perhaps no one has captured, in a few words, the essence of why Castro was so popular better than President Dwight D. Eisenhower. In his book
Waging Peace
, after noting that during Castro’s revolution against Batista, “sentimental support for Castro was widespread” in the United States, he writes,

Castro’s struggle had been going on for years. On the 26th of July 1953, a date which gave his movement its name, he and a little band of followers had unsuccessfully attacked the Moncada Barracks in Santiago de Cuba. After a tempestuous 3½ years of fighting, imprisonment, and exile in Mexico [where he met and joined hands with Argentinian revolutionary Ernesto “Che” Guevara], Castro returned to Cuba, where he hid out in the Sierra Maestra mountains, conducting intermittent guerrilla forays. Herbert L. Matthews of the
New York Times
, having held exclusive talks with Castro in his mountain hideout, proclaimed him “the most remarkable and romantic figure to arise in Cuban history since José Martí [1853–1895, Cuban patriot and writer], the hero of the Wars of Independence.” And in the absence of reports to the contrary, and the universal revulsion against the Batista government, it is not surprising that large numbers of his readers should have echoed Matthews’ views. Castro promised free elections, social reform, schools, housing, and an end to corruption. Though some individuals, in and out of government, voiced suspicions that the Castro movement was Communist inspired and supported, these rumblings were drowned out by the chorus of plaudits encouraging the “liberator.”
²

Castro’s overthrow of Batista in early January of 1959 was initially heralded in the United States by a majority of Americans.
³
Indeed, Senator John F. Kennedy himself, just a year and a half before he tried to depose him, sang Castro’s praise. In his 1960 book,
The Strategy of Peace
, he writes that “we should now reread the life of Simón Bolivar, the great ‘Liberator’…of South America in order to comprehend the new contagion for liberty and reform now spreading south of our borders…Fidel Castro is part of the legacy of Bolivar,
*
who led his men over the Andes Mountains vowing ‘war to the death’ against Spanish rule.” (Kennedy’s editor writes in a footnote that “the regime of Batista and his army had been highly repressive; it had arrested many thousands of people, jailed them, tortured and executed them. Since he had ousted President Carlos Prio Socarras in 1952, civil liberty had been without a home in Cuba.”)
⁴
The telling point is that Kennedy wrote these words
after
he had been fully aware, as his editor writes in another footnote, that Castro had “ruthlessly executed many of his enemies, publicly asserted that Cuba would not align itself with the West in the Cold War, and placed Communists in some key posts of government.” Kennedy writes that “whether Castro would have taken a more rational course after his victory had the United States Government not backed the dictator Batista so long
†
and so uncritically, and had it given the fiery young rebel [Castro] a warmer welcome in his hour of triumph, especially on his trip to this country [Eisenhower didn’t meet with Castro, palming him off on Nixon, who reportedly was chilly toward the bearded Fidel], we cannot be sure.”
⁵

The Batista regime was known mostly for its corruption, but he was also a brutal dictator, his intelligence arm BRAC (Buro para Repressión de las Actividades Communistas, “Bureau for Repression of the Communist Activities”) visiting torture and often murder on his political opposition.
⁶
Indeed, the denunciation of Castro’s firing squads, in which 150 ex-Batista officials were publicly executed within two weeks of Castro’s assuming power in early January 1959, and at least 506 within three months,
⁷
has to be tempered with the acknowledgment that at least some (and perhaps many) of those killed had themselves committed murder, and hence, their execution was no different from a death penalty being carried out against a convicted murderer here in the states—absent due process, of course. For instance, one of Batista’s henchmen, Ramón Calvinio, who worked under Colonel Esteban Ventura, a top police chief in Batista’s regime, got away but resurfaced allegedly as part of the rebel invasion at the Bay of Pigs in 1961. In nationally televised interrogations of some of the captured rebels, Calvinio was confronted by a woman who screamed that he had killed her husband before her eyes. Weeping, the woman shouted at Calvinio, “Do you remember me, Calvinio, do you remember my husband? I hope I can be on the firing squad that will shoot you.” Another accuser was a man who charged Calvinio with having assassinated his friends in the Castro underground movement.
⁸
*

For months after Castro took over the reign of power, there were “mutual expressions of friendship and cooperation” between the United States and Castro’s revolutionary government. Additionally, President Eisenhower’s appointment of Philip Bonsal as U.S. ambassador to Cuba to replace Ambassador Earl E. T. Smith, “who was known to be personally suspicious of Castro, was a clear signal to the new Cuban leader that the United States was interested in amicable relations” with his new government.
⁹

In any event, to the great dismay of the United States and many in Cuba, Castro soon drifted more and more toward repression, and under the influence of his brother Raul and Che Guevara, who were more ideological Communists than the pragmatic Fidel,
¹⁰
toward a Communistic society. But the “outing” was not as swift and clear as many now believe. The strongest message didn’t occur until May 17, 1959, over four and a half months after Castro came to power, with the passage of the Agrarian Reform Law, which limited private ownership of land to one thousand acres, the government confiscating and distributing the remaining land to peasants. At the time, approximately 75 percent of Cuba’s arable land was owned by foreign interests.
¹¹
†
And actually, it wasn’t until October 19 that an incident occurred which precipitated the formation of the first organized anti-Castro opposition
within
Cuba. Major Huber Matos, one of the principal heroes of Castro’s revolution and one of Castro’s highest-ranking officers, resigned from Castro’s army in declared protest against Castro’s increasingly demonstrated favoritism toward known Communists. Matos was arrested two days later, tried and convicted of treason, and sentenced to twenty years in prison.

The cat almost out of the bag, Castro met secretly shortly thereafter with his National Agrarian Reform Institute (INRA) managers from the various provinces of Cuba and outlined a plan to communize Cuba within three years. Manuel Artime Buesa, a first lieutenant in Castro’s “Red Army,” and Castro’s manager in Oriente province who would later be one of the leaders of the Bay of Pigs invasion, was present at the meeting and would later say, “I realized that I was a democratic infiltrator in a Communist government.” Artime went back to his province and on October 29, 1959, penned what would become a famous letter to “Dr. Fidel Castro Ruz, Sierra Maestra,” in which he resigned his post in the Red Army and his INRA command and defended Huber Matos as a “patriot.” The letter was a strong indictment of Castro’s Cuban government on the ground that it was heavily infiltrated with Communists, and it accused Castro of, in effect, outlining a plan at the INRA meeting to communize Cuba. Artime immediately went into hiding and started to organize students and peasants to fight against Castro and Communism. By early November, the counterrevolutionary Artime had cells of his underground movement in each province in Cuba, and had published his manifesto,
Comunismo
,
para qué?
(Communism, What For?). His movement was called Movimiento de Recuperacion Revolucionaria (MRR), the first anti-Castro group inside Cuba and one originating from within Castro’s own ranks.
¹²

On the same day that Matos came out against Castro, October 19, 1959, the U.S. government began its embargo on U.S. goods to Cuba. Five days later, in response to the embargo, Castro nationalized all remaining
*
U.S. properties in Cuba.
¹³
This was extremely significant since the United States virtually “owned” Cuba before this. As Senator John F. Kennedy said, “At the beginning of 1959, U.S. companies owned about 40 percent of the Cuban sugar lands, almost all of the cattle ranches, 90 percent of the mines and mineral concessions, 80 percent of the utilities and practically all the oil industry, and supplied two-thirds of Cuba’s imports.”
¹⁴

But it wasn’t until January 2, 1961, that the U.S. government broke off all diplomatic relations with Cuba. By April of 1961, more than a hundred thousand Cubans had fled Castro’s revolution, nearly all to the United States, where, to this very day, they and most of their progeny have been living in anticipation of Castro’s overthrow.
¹⁵

S
ylvia Odio was born in Havana, Cuba, in 1937, one of ten children and the oldest daughter of Amador and Sarah Odio. In Batista’s Cuba, the Odios were members of the wealthy aristocracy, Amador being the owner of the country’s largest trucking company.
Time
magazine described him as the “transport tycoon” of Latin America.

Sylvia’s parents, from their youth, had been idealistic and active opponents of a succession of tyrants who ruled Cuba, going back to the reign of General Gerardo Machado in the 1930s. In fact, twice during the dictatorship of Batista, the Odios were forced into exile for their dissident activity. Their nationalistic fervor and desire for democracy caused them to be early supporters of Castro (despite the fact that Castro’s whole 26th of July Movement was to bring about land reform and secure a bigger share of the country’s wealth for the working class), and the trucks of Amador Odio’s company, bearing arms and medical supplies, helped sustain Castro’s insurgency movement in the Sierra Maestra mountains, the mountain range in Cuba’s Oriente province from which Castro launched his guerilla revolution against Batista.