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November 27,
2003
Killing of Kennedy may have
derailed Cuba pact
BY JULIAN
BORGER in Washington for
Sydney Morning Herald (Australia)
Days before
his assassination, president John F. Kennedy was
planning a meeting with
Cuban officials to negotiate the normalisation of
relations with Fidel
Castro, a declassified tape and White House
documents reveal.
The
rapprochement was cut off in Dallas 40 years ago by
Lee Harvey Oswald, who
appears to have believed he was assassinating the
president in the interests
of the Cuban revolution.
But the new
evidence suggests Dr Castro saw Kennedy's killing as
a setback. He sought a
dialogue with the next administration, but Lyndon
Johnson was at first too
concerned about appearing soft on communism and
later too distracted by
Vietnam to respond.
Peter
Kornbluh, a researcher at Washington's National
Security Archives, said
the new evidence "shows that the whole history of
US-Cuban relations might
have been quite different if Kennedy had not been
assassinated".
Dr Castro's
and JFK's tentative flirtation came at a time of
extraordinary acrimony in
the wake of the US-backed Bay of Pigs invasion by
Cuban exiles and the
missile crisis that led the world to the brink of
nuclear war.
On a newly
declassified Oval Office audiotape, recorded 17 days
before the assassination,
Kennedy is heard discussing the option of a meeting
with his national security
adviser, McGeorge Bundy.
The
president agrees in principle to send a US diplomat,
Bill Attwood, but
frets that news of the secret mission could leak
out. The key intermediary
was Lisa Howard, an actress who had become a leading
television journalist when she
landed an interview with the Soviet leader,
Nikita Khrushchev.
In April
1963 she interviewed Dr Castro, and returned with a
message that the Cuban
leader was anxious to talk. The president was
receptive.
The CIA was
pursuing various schemes aimed at assassinating or
undermining Dr Castro, but
Kennedy's aides were increasingly convinced Havana
could be weaned away from
Moscow.
The
administration gave a nod to Ms Howard, who set up a
meeting between Mr Attwood
and the Cuban ambassador to the UN, Carlos Lechuga.
Her flat
then became a communications centre between Mr
Attwood and the Castro
regime. Dr Castro's aide, Dr Rene Vallejo, called at
arranged times to talk to
Mr Attwood, and in the northern autumn of 1963
suggested Mr Attwood fly
to Mexico and on to Cuba, where the Cuban leader
would talk to him alone in
a hangar.
The plan,
however, was sunk by the assassination. Ms Howard
continued to ferry
messages from Dr Castro, in which the Cuban leader
expresses his support for
Johnson's 1964 election and even offers to turn the
other cheek if the new US
leader wanted to indulge in some electoral
Cuba-bashing. But the new
president did not have the Cold War credentials of
having faced down Moscow
over the Cuban missile crisis. The moment had
passed.
The Guardian
This story
was found at:
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/11/26/1069825847243.html
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