Posted in Crisis de los misilesJohn F. The assassination of John F. The assassination itself was carried out by a sole killer, Lee Harvey Oswald, out of his admiration for Fidel Castro and his animosity toward the American Government and its President. Until now, nothing solid has emerged to support this thesis.
In DecemberThe Atlanticthe prestigious magazine founded in Boston inpublished a list of the most influential Americans in the history of the country.
The list included, besides presidents, also writers and others, including…baseball players. But the list did not contain the name of John F.
This was certainly not due to inadvertence. It was a slap, the motive behind which was unclear…unless it was a relic of the religious wars — Kennedy having been the first Catholic president of the United States. I was astounded when I heard about the article in The Atlantic. At the end luno bloc party traducida en the afternoon of October 27,Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara paused on the steps of the Pentagon to look at the sunset, thinking at that moment that he might never see a sunset again2 — because on that day the Missile Cisis had reached its paroxysm: The attack had been carried out by Russian troops on orders of Fidel Castro.
I luno bloc party traducida en this anecdote of Robert McNamara to show that the margin between a political solution to the crisis and a nuclear holocaust was extremely thin throughout the thirteen days of the crisis — during which time the President warded off the insistent appeals by most of his senior military officers for an immediate attack on Cuba.
The famous thirteen days comprised the period between the discovery of the missiles by the American U-2 airplane on October 15, and the move toward a political solution when Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev announced on October 27 that he was removing the missiles from the island since Kennedy had agreed not to invade Cuba.
During these thirteen days, the Soviet missiles had not become operational, giving President Kennedy a window of sufficient time to ponder a prudential solution to the crisis while avoiding the risk of a nuclear war with the USSR. The Soviets stuck to their word, respecting the agreement made by the two interlocutors.
But because of this fact, and from the point of view of public relations, the Soviet Union came off as the loser in the missile crisis. The danger had been so great during the missile crisis that President Kennedy made an effort to ensure that such a situation should never arise again. A hot line was established between the White House and the Kremlin.
In addition, the first agreement on nuclear disarmament — the Limited Test Ban Treaty — was signed in the summer of A year after the missile crisis, on Friday, 22 NovemberPresident Kennedy was assassinated at Dallas. The back story to this act still remains mysterious, from the fact that the killer, Lee Harvey Oswald, was himself shot dead before then end of the weekend. Fifty years later, the shadow luno bloc party traducida en this incident persists.
One can certainly situate the motivation of the assassin, Oswald. He was a great admirer of Fidel Castro. He had participated earlier that autumn in a rally in New Orleans in support of the Cuban regime. It was granted but only after the fateful weekend of November. What remains unknown is the question of contacts Oswald might have had with agents of the powerful Cuban intelligence service, the Directorate General of Intelligence DGIin Mexico City or elsewhere.
And in the final analysis, the question remains open as to whether Fidel Castro himself might have been implicated in the assassination of the young American President. With fifty years having gone by, nothing concrete luno bloc party traducida en emerged as to the involvement of the Cuban government or Cuban intelligence in the assassination; which leads to the conclusion luno bloc party traducida en provisionally — that Oswald acted on his own, out of his admiration for Castro.
Perhaps after the death of Castro more will be learned about the role of the Cubans. Nevertheless Castro, because of his reckless temperament, and because luno bloc party traducida en the information he possessed concerning the plots of the Kennedy brothers against his person, would make a perfectly credible sponsor of an operation to luno bloc party traducida en the President.
At the moment of the Cuban Missile Crisis, Castro seemed to want to bring on a nuclear holocaust which, though it luno bloc party traducida en destroy the island of Cuba, would in his mind open the way to a communization of the world.
The French newspaper Le Monde published on 23 November a series of letters exchanged between Castro and Nikita Khrushchev, in which the Cuban leader asked Khrushchev to initiate a nuclear war in the event that American forces attacked Cuba. Subsequently the letters were published elsewhere, luno bloc party traducida en in The Armageddon Letters. In sum, Fidel Castro was prepared to sacrifice his country for the benefit of a future world of communism. In a message to Khrushchev on 26 OctoberCastro wrote, inter alia, the following:.
If…the imperialists invade Cuba with the goal of occupying it, the danger that this aggressive policy luno bloc party traducida en for humanity is so great that following that event the Soviet Union must never allow the circumstances in which the imperialists could launch the first nuclear strike against it.
The message was clear, although implicit: In a luno bloc party traducida en of 27 October, Khrushchev informed Castro that a solution was in luno bloc party traducida en, as President Kennedy had promised not to invade Cuba. Khrushchev advised Castro not to be carried away by his emotions and not to respond to provocations, such as the attack he ordered against an American U-2 airplane on 27 October, which claimed the luno bloc party traducida en of the pilot.
The aggressors will take advantage of such a step for their own purposes. It was on the same date as the shootdown, 27 October, that Khrushchev accepted the public compromise proposed by his American counterpart — that is, the withdrawal of the missiles in return for a commitment by the United States not to invade Cuba.
Castro replied the next day, 28 October. The following is an extract:. Earlier isolated violations were committed without a determined military purpose or without a real danger stemming from those flights.
There was the danger of a surprise attack on certain military installations. In your [message]…you proposed that we be luno bloc party traducida en first luno bloc party traducida en launch a nuclear attack on the territory of the enemy.
Obviously you are luno bloc party traducida en of what could follow. Rather than a single strike, it would have been luno bloc party traducida en beginning of a thermonuclear war. We knew, and one luno bloc party traducida en not think otherwise, that we would be annihilated, as you indicated in your letter, if there was a nuclear war. That did not lead us to yield.
Castro believed that Cuba was doomed, that war was inevitable, and that the Soviets should transform Cuba from a mere victim into a martyr. Shortly after this exchange of letters, Khrushchev sent the seasoned diplomat, Anastas Mikoyan, to Havana to continue the discussions with the Cuban leaders.
The following is an extract of an exchange between Mikoyan and Che Guevara on November 5, Even in the context of all our respect for the Soviet Union, we believe that the decisions made by the Soviet Union were a mistake. But we thought that you would be satisfied by our act. We did everything so that Cuba would not be destroyed. Fidel Castro, at a later time, had a different story to tell.
In a report of an interview with Castro at Havana, published in The Atlantic on October 16,Jeffrey Goldberg recalled that he had had the following exchange with Castro a couple of years earlier:. Does what you recommended [that the Soviets launch a nuclear attack against the U. As to the knowledge Castro had of American intentions against Cuba and against Castro himself, the Cuban leader was amply informed.
After he had seized luno bloc party traducida en, Castro became aware of the hostility of the United States towards his regime. Even before he became President, John Kennedy had been alerted by his advisers of the danger that the new revolutionary regime in Cuba represented, and the possibility that Fidel Castro might invite the Soviets to establish forces on the island.
A Soviet base kilometers from American territory luno bloc party traducida en not be permitted in the midst of the Cold War. There followed the disaster of the Bay of Pigs, an operation inherited from the administration of Dwight Eisenhower, and during which Kennedy refused coverage of the landing beach by the U. Air Force, thereby clinching the failure of the operation.
The humiliation of the Bay of Pigs fiasco only doubled the determination of the Kennedy brothers to remove Castro. In Octobera covert operation, codenamed Mongoose, was launched against the Cuban regime, with at its head Robert Kennedy, then the Attorney- General. A so-called Augmented Special Group was created in the White House and set about planning lethal attacks on Castro himself and conducting sabotage operations on the island.
Virtually all of these activities either failed or did not see the light of day. But the essential point here is that Castro was well aware of the lethal intentions of the Kennedy brothers, and this could have incited him to retaliate against the American President, using his own Cuban intelligence service, the DGI.
Ina DGI agent, Rolando Cubela, let it be known through an intermediary that he was against Castro and was seeking a contact with the Americans. The contact was dropped shortly afterwards, when Cubela refused to take a polygraph test. Thirty years later the fact that from the outset Cubela had been a double agent was confirmed by a Cuban agent of the CIA. The venue suggested for meetings between Sanchez and Cubela was Paris.
Presumably this was at Cuban instigation, as Cuba had an embassy there and thus had agents available for counter-surveillance. By an irony of fate, a meeting was scheduled for 22 November By that point the CIA was preparing to have delivered to Cubela in Cuba a rifle with telescopic sights — ironically the same type of weapon that Oswald used against Kennedy.
The assassination of the American President the same day cut off further attempts to assassinate Castro, although the CIA contact with Cubela was maintained until December The Castro regime, whether or not it was involved in the assassination of John F.
Kennedy, had every pretext to do so. In this regard, it is well luno bloc party traducida en keep in mind the role of the CIA in the early. Moreover, the ease with which the CIA overthrew the regime of Jacobo Guzman in Guatemala and that of Mohammed Mossadegh in Iran created an atmosphere of invincibility around the CIA and gave rise to the idea that covert action was an effective tool of its own, between war and diplomacy.
This led to the botched operation of the Bay of Pigs in Luno bloc party traducida en But this failure only redoubled the efforts of the Kennedy brothers to do away with Castro. One could speculate that, because of the high degree of professionalism of the DGI, that organization has been able to conceal all these years an involvement with Oswald. Stanford UP,p. Blight and Janet M. Cogan is an Affiliate vice Associate at the John F.
Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University. A graduate of Harvard, then a journalist, and then a military officer, he spent thirty-seven years in the Central Intelligence Agency, twenty-three of them on assignments overseas.
He lectures and writes in English and French. Humanities and Social Sciences Online. H-Net permits the redistribution and reprinting of this work for non-profit, educational purposes, with full and accurate attribution to the author sweb location, date of publication, H-Diplo, and H-Net: For other uses, contact the H-Diplo editorial staff at h — d i p l o h — n e t.
Posted in John F. And yet, particularly this year, his legacy has aroused the ire of debunkers who complain that Kennedy is unworthy of all this adulation. He was, they say, all image and no substance, a shallow playboy whose foreign policy mistakes and paltry legislative record luno bloc party traducida en any claim to greatness.
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