Did Castro Order JFK's Assassination?

German filmmaker Wilfried Huismann's documentary "Rendezvous With Death" is causing quite a stir among followers of the John Kennedy assassination. Not necessarily because of the originality of his charges -- that Cuban dictator Fidel Castro order JFK murdered -- but moreso for the high quality of the interviewees featured in the film:

Award-winning filmmaker Huismann relies on newly declassified documents from the Mexican government as well as interviews with aging, colorful insiders from the Cuban intelligence service, G2, the FBI and a veteran American statesman.

Oscar Marino, a former Cuban secret agent who has broken with Castro, tells the camera that Havana wanted Kennedy dead because "he was an enemy of the Cuban Revolution" -- a sworn and public enemy who had even sent a team of CIA-contracted militants to overthrow Castro in 1961. (That mission failed at the Bay of Pigs.) "Why did we take Oswald?" he says. "There wasn't anyone else. You take what you can get ... Oswald volunteered to kill Kennedy."

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General Alexander Haig, for example, thinks Kennedy's successor, President Lyndon B. Johnson, "was convinced Castro killed Kennedy, and he took it to his grave." Haig served as a military adviser to Johnson and later as President Reagan's Secretary of State. He tells Huismann in the film about memos from 1963 that suggested Johnson's fear of letting the Castro-assassination story get out to the American public. Johnson's attitude, said Haig, was that "we cannot allow the American people to believe that Castro ... had killed Kennedy," because "there would be a right-wing uprising in America which would keep the Democratic Party out of power for two generations."

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(Laurence) Keenan, 81, is another source for Huismann. He was an FBI agent sent personally by J. Edgar Hoover to Mexico City in the days after Kennedy's assassination to investigate claims that Oswald had some connection with the Cuban embassy there. After three and a half days, he was recalled. "I was a messenger," he says in the film -- intended to deliver the news to elements of the Cuban government that Washington wouldn't push the case. "It was clear I was being used. I felt ashamed," Keenan says in the film. "We missed a historical chance" to clear up the assassination.

Huismann also talks to a retired surgeon in Madrid named Rolando Cubela, who became a rival of Castro's after helping him lead the 1959 revolution. In the documentary, Cubela claims the CIA contracted him to kill Castro with a poisonous fountain pen. This mission -- meant to occur on Nov. 22, 1963, the very day Kennedy died -- failed, and Castro is still in charge of Cuba almost 43 years later. "He bested us," says retired CIA officer Sam Helpern at the end of Huismann's film. "He came out on top. And we lost."

Did Castro use Oswald to kill JFK -- before JFK could knock off The Beard? We can only speculate, although we do know that Oswald met with G2 agents in Mexico just two months before Dealey Plaza. But at least interviews with these firsthand players are captured for history's sake. And this theory certainly makes more sense than the Jim Garrison/Oliver Stone one -- which changed about 100 times from 1963 until Clay Shaw's acquittal in 1969.

Not surprisingly, Fidel is upset over Huismann's documentary.

P.S. To read more about the opposite of Huismann's theory, check out this BaT post from last December. It received 32 comments -- by far a record for this humble site. And I admit, I'm shamelessly trolling for more site visits with this latest JFK post. ;-)