Archiving the Cold War
The contradictory interpretations sparked by the 64,000 declassified files on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
By Rafael Rojas* (Confidencial)
HAVANA TIMES – The contradictory interpretations sparked these days by the 64,000 files on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy—declassified by order of Donald Trump—are nothing short of astonishing. All kinds of conclusions can be found on social media: from the expected ones that blame the assassination on the CIA or Fidel Castro, to the most far-fetched involving the Soviets, the Mossad, or the Italian mafia.
The declassification has only amplified the long-standing atmosphere of skepticism and speculation that, for the past sixty years, has surrounded the official theory that Lee Harvey Oswald was solely responsible for Kennedy’s death on November 22, 1963. The newly released information adds more doubt to the lone gunman theory, but it also fails to provide sufficient evidence to support any alternative hypothesis.
The declassified documents are of many kinds, but one type dominates: CIA memos containing information from agents around the world, before and after the assassination in Dallas. It’s a vast collection that provides an X-ray of CIA operations from the 1950s to the 1970s. This is Cold War-era archival material that reveals how Washington—alongside Moscow, Mexico, and Cuba—moved their intelligence pieces in support of, or opposition to, international communism.
Some memos reveal the surveillance conducted by the CIA and FBI on Lee Harvey Oswald’s visits to the Soviet and Cuban embassies in Mexico in September 1963, two months before the president’s assassination. The former Marine had lived in Minsk between 1959 and 1962 and wanted to travel to Cuba and from there, return to Moscow. Since his return to the United States, Oswald had been connected with the Fair Play for Cuba Committee in New Orleans, a New York-based organization that promoted the end of the trade embargo and better relations between Washington and Havana.
However, Oswald, a US Marine who had defected to the Soviet Union and later regretted his defection, was also associated with Carlos Bringuier, a member of the anti-Castro organization Students Revolutionary Directorate in New Orleans. Oswald’s connections with the Soviets, with Silvia Duran (a Mexican who worked at the Cuban embassy in Mexico), and with anti-Castro groups in New Orleans generated over the years dozens of reports, which brought little clarity to the events in Dallas.
Through these documents, we find somewhat familiar reports about Cuba in the 1960s. For example, there’s mention of the Cuban offensive against anti-Castro guerrilla leader Oswaldo Ramírez in the Escambray Mountains, who was executed in April 1962, or Cuba’s support for the guerrillas of Fabricio Ojeda in Venezuela and Hugo Blanco in Peru—both part of the first wave of armed struggle in Latin America.
The documents also provide details about Cuba’s support for various Latin American guerrilla movements during the 1960s. Some informants rightly observed that this was a higher priority for the Cuban government than direct action against the United States after the Kennedy-Khrushchev pact in October 1962. Once again, this aligns with what contemporary historiography has long accepted, such as the extensive operational capacity of the CIA’s Mexico City office under Winston Scott.
Perhaps the only thing this declassification clarifies is why these documents were classified for so long. For decades, United States administrations refused to release them not because they would clarify Kennedy’s assassination, but because they exposed the arbitrariness, absurdity, and inefficiency of the security apparatus during the Cold War.
*This article was originally published in La Razón, of Mexico. I t was translated and posted in English by Havana Times.