Cuban Exiles
The House Select Committee on Assassinations wrote: "The committee believes, on the basis of the evidence available to it, that anti-Castro Cuban groups, as groups, were not involved in the assassination of President Kennedy, but that the available evidence does not preclude the possibility that individual members may have been involved".
With the 1959 Cuban Revolution that brought Fidel Castro to power, thousands of Cubans left their homeland to take up residence in the United States. Many exiles hoped to overthrow Castro and return to Cuba. Their hopes were dashed with the failed Bay of Pigs Invasion in 1961, and many exiles blamed President Kennedy for the failure.
The House Select Committee on Assassinations concluded that some militant Cuban exiles might have participated in Kennedy's murder. These exiles worked closely with CIA operatives in violent activities against Castro's Cuba. In 1979, the committee reported:
President Kennedy's popularity among the Cuban exiles had plunged deeply by 1963. Their bitterness is illustrated in a tape recording of a meeting of anti-Castro Cubans and right-wing Americans in the Dallas suburb of Farmer's Branch on October 1, 1963.
Holding a copy of the September 26 edition of The Dallas Morning News, featuring a front-page account of the President's planned trip to Texas in November, Cuban exile Nestor Castellanos vented his hostility:
CASTELLANOS ...we're waiting for Kennedy the 22d, buddy. We're going to see him in one way or the other. We're going to give him the works when he gets in Dallas. Mr. good ol' Kennedy. I wouldn't even call him President Kennedy. He stinks.
Author Joan Didion explored the Miami anti-Castro Cuban theory in her 1987 non-fiction book Miami. She discussed Marita Lorenz' testimony regarding Guillermo Novo, a Cuban exile who was involved in shooting a bazooka at the U.N. building from the East River during a speech by Che Guevara. Allegedly, Novo was affiliated with Lee Harvey Oswald and Frank Sturgis and carried weapons with them to a hotel in Dallas just prior to the assassination. These claims, though put forth to the House Assassinations Committee by Lorenz, were never substantiated by a conclusive investigation.
Read more about this topic: John F. Kennedy Assassination Conspiracy Theories, Conspiracy Theories
Famous quotes containing the words cuban and/or exiles:
“Because a person is born the subject of a given state, you deny the sovereignty of the people? How about the child of Cuban slaves who is born a slave, is that an argument for slavery? The one is a fact as well as the other. Why then, if you use legal arguments in the one case, you don’t in the other?”
—Franz Grillparzer (1791–1872)
“My imagination makes me human and makes me a fool; it gives me all the world and exiles me from it.”
—Ursula K. Le Guin (b. 1929)