Interest in Cuba
By August of 1963, Oswald had for some time been considering the possibility of leaving the United States again. On June 24, 1963, he applied for a new passport[C7-371] and in late June or early July he told his wife that he wanted to return to the Soviet Union with her. She said that he was extremely upset, very unhappy, and that he actually wept when he told her that.[C7-372] He said that nothing kept him in the United States, that he would not lose anything if he returned to the Soviet Union, that he wanted to be with her and that it would be better to have less and not have to be concerned about tomorrow.[C7-373]
As a result of that conversation, Marina Oswald wrote the Soviet Embassy in Washington concerning a request she had first made on February 17, 1963, for permission for herself and June to return to the Soviet Union.[C7-374] While that first request, made according to Marina Oswald at her husband’s insistence, specifically stated that Oswald was to remain in the United States, she wrote in her letter of July 1963, that “things are improving due to the fact that my husband expresses a sincere wish to return together with me to the USSR.”[C7-375] Unknown to his wife, however, Oswald apparently enclosed a note with her letter of July in which he requested the Embassy to rush his wife’s entrance visa because of the impending birth of the second child but stated that: “As for my return entrance visa please consider it separtably.”[C7-376]
Thus, while Oswald’s real intentions, assuming that they were known to himself, are not clear, he may not have intended to go to the Soviet Union directly, if at all.[C7-377] It appears that he really wanted to go to Cuba. In his wife’s words:
I only know that his basic desire was to get to Cuba by any means, and that all the rest of it was window dressing for that purpose.[C7-378]
Marina Oswald testified that her husband engaged in Fair Play for Cuba Committee activities “primarily for purposes of self-advertising. He wanted to be arrested. I think he wanted to get into the newspapers, so that he would be known.”[C7-379] According to Marina Oswald, he thought that would help him when he got to Cuba.[C7-380] He asked his wife to help him to hijack an airplane to get there, but gave up that scheme when she refused.[C7-381]
During this period Oswald may have practiced opening and closing the bolt on his rifle in a screened porch in his apartment.[C7-382] In September he began to review Spanish.[C7-383] He approved arrangements for his family to return to Irving, Tex., to live with Mrs. Ruth Paine.[C7-384] On September 20, 1963, Mrs. Paine and her two children arrived in New Orleans from a trip to the East Coast[C7-385] and left for Irving with Marina Oswald and June and most of the Oswalds’ effects 3 days later.[C7-386] While Marina Oswald knew of her husband’s plan to go to Mexico and thence to Cuba if possible,[C7-387] Mrs. Paine was told that Oswald was going to Houston and possibly to Philadelphia to look for work.[C7-388]
Oswald left for Mexico City on September 25, 1963, and arrived on September 27, 1963. He went almost directly to the Cuban Embassy and applied for a visa to Cuba in transit to Russia.[C7-389] Representing himself as the head of the New Orleans branch of the “organization called ‘Fair Play for Cuba,’ he stated his desire that he should be accepted as a ‘friend’ of the Cuban Revolution.”[C7-390] He apparently based his claim for a visa in transit to Russia on his previous residence, his work permit for that country, and several unidentified letters in the Russian language. The Cubans would not, however, give him a visa until he had received one from the Soviets, which involved a delay of several months. When faced with that situation Oswald became greatly agitated, and although he later unsuccessfully attempted to obtain a Soviet visa at the Soviet Embassy in Mexico City, he insisted that he was entitled to the Cuban visa because of his background, partisanship, and personal activities on behalf of the Cuban movement. He engaged in an angry argument with the consul who finally told him that “as far as he was concerned he would not give him a visa” and that “a person like him [Oswald] in place of aiding the Cuban Revolution, was doing it harm.”[C7-391]
Oswald must have been thoroughly disillusioned when he left Mexico City on October 2, 1963. In spite of his former residence in the Soviet Union and his Fair Play for Cuba Committee activities he had been rebuffed by the officials of both Cuba and the Soviet Union in Mexico City. Now there appeared to be no chance to get to Cuba, where he had thought he might find his communist ideal. The U.S. Government would not permit travel there and as far as the performance of the Cubans themselves was concerned, he was “disappointed at not being able to get to Cuba, and he didn’t have any great desire to do so any more because he had run into, as he himself said—into bureaucracy and red tape.”[C7-392]
Oswald’s attempt to go to Cuba was another act which expressed his hostility toward the United States and its institutions as well as a concomitant attachment to a country in which he must have thought were embodied the political principles to which he had been committed for so long. It should be noted that his interest in Cuba seems to have increased along with the sense of frustration which must have developed as he experienced successive failures in his jobs, in his political activity, and in his personal relationships. In retrospect his attempt to go to Cuba or return to the Soviet Union may well have been Oswald’s last escape hatch, his last gambit to extricate himself from the mediocrity and defeat which plagued him throughout most of his life.
Oswald’s activities with regard to Cuba raise serious questions as to how much he might have been motivated in the assassination by a desire to aid the Castro regime, which President Kennedy so outspokenly criticized. For example, the Dallas Times Herald of November 19, 1963, prominently reported President Kennedy as having “all but invited the Cuban people today to overthrow Fidel Castro’s Communist regime and promised prompt U.S. aid if they do.”[C7-393] The Castro regime severely attacked President Kennedy in connection with the Bay of Pigs affair, the Cuban missile crisis, the ban on travel to Cuba, the economic embargo against that country, and the general policy of the United States with regard to Cuba. An examination of the Militant, to which Oswald subscribed,[C7-394] for the 3-month period prior to the assassination reflects an extremely critical attitude toward President Kennedy and his administration concerning Cuban policy in general as well as on the issues of automation and civil rights, issues which appeared to concern Oswald a great deal.[C7-395] The Militant also reflected a critical attitude toward President Kennedy’s attempts to reduce tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union. It also dealt with the fear of the Castro regime that such a policy might result in its abandonment by the Soviet Union.
The October 7, 1963, issue of the Militant reported Castro as saying Cuba could not accept a situation where at the same time the United States was trying to ease world tensions it also “was increasing its efforts to ‘tighten the noose’ around Cuba.”[C7-396] Castro’s opposition to President Kennedy’s attempt to reduce world tensions was also reported in the October 1, 1963, issue of the Worker, to which Oswald also subscribed.[C7-397] In this connection it should be noted that in speaking of the Worker, Oswald told Michael Paine, apparently in all seriousness, that “you could tell what they wanted you to do * * * by reading between the lines, reading the thing and doing a little reading between the lines.”[C7-398]
The general conflict of views between the United States and Cuba was, of course, reflected in other media to such an extent that there can be no doubt that Oswald was aware generally of the critical attitude that Castro expressed about President Kennedy. Oswald was asked during the New Orleans radio debate in which he engaged on August 21, 1963, whether or not he agreed with Castro that President Kennedy was a “ruffian and a thief.” He replied that he “would not agree with that particular wording.”[C7-399] It should also be noted, however, that one witness testified that shortly before the assassination Oswald had expressed approval of President Kennedy’s active role in the area of civil rights.[C7-400]
Although Oswald could possibly have been motivated in part by his sympathy for the Castro government, it should be remembered that his wife testified that he was disappointed with his failure to get to Cuba and had lost his desire to do so because of the bureaucracy and red tape which he had encountered.[C7-401] His unhappy experience with the Cuban consul seems thus to have reduced his enthusiasm for the Castro regime and his desire to go to Cuba.
While some of Castro’s more severe criticisms of President Kennedy might have led Oswald to believe that he would be well received in Cuba after he had assassinated the American President, it does not appear that he had any plans to go there. Oswald was carrying only $13.87 at the time of his arrest, although he had left, apparently by design, $170 in a wallet in his wife’s room in Irving.[C7-402] If there was no conspiracy which would help him escape, the possibility of which has been considered in chapter VI, it is unlikely that a reasoning person would plan to attempt to travel from Dallas, Tex., to Cuba with $13.87 when considerably greater resources were available to him. The fact that Oswald left behind the funds which might have enabled him to reach Cuba suggests the absence of any plan to try to flee there and raises serious questions as to whether or not he ever expected to escape.