Wilfried Huismann, the documentary’s director, is the current instrument to affirm, according to the German agency: "It was Castro’s revenge for the CIA attempt to assassinate him with a poisoned pen."

It is not an accusation to be underestimated. The shocking assassination had such an impact on the world that even today, when it is evoked, somebody will remember where they were at the time.

For my part, on November 22, 1963, I was in the picturesque La Percherie restaurant in the port of Algiers, anticipating the house’s excellent snails with Helen Klein, the U.S. press chief of President Ahmed Ben Bella. We suddenly received the terrible news.

"President Kennedy has been assassinated!" Now they are going to blame Cuba," I immediately said to her.

"Don’t exaggerate," she answered.

We quickly went to the Prensa Latina agency on 26, Rue Claude Debussy, where I was working as a correspondent, for more information. There I learned how the radio stations were repeating that the Cuban government was responsible for the assassination. Surprised, Helen asked me how I had guessed it.

"I’m not a fortune teller," I explained, "But for the United States Cuba is the cause of all evil. A little bit of it because of hysteria and another little but because they are looking for a pretext to try and crush us."

However, a few hours later, the accusation vanished into the air with the same speed that it had entered. At that point everything was shrouded in mystery.

Fifteen years later, in Washington, the same charge was floating in the air for the umpteenth time. The Special Committee investigating the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, his brother Robert and Martin Luther King, was handling many theories on the assassination of the president of the United States. Once again the attempt to raise suspicions as to the Cuban government’s involvement was being floated in the media.

A Washington journalist with close links to the FBI, revealed to me in confidence that the version originally came from the CIA, which distributed a note stating that Oswald had committed the murder on behalf of the Cuban government. He added that the FBI forced the media to withdraw the accusation.

When I asked the veteran journalist why the FBI had taken the trouble to de-authorize the CIA, he explained that they considered the initiative an irresponsibility that could have unleashed incalculable consequences, such as a third world war.

The first significant investigation into the assassination was undertaken by the Warren Commission, which considered that theory and discounted it by stating that there was no such conspiracy.

However, starting in 1967, the Drew Pearson and Jack Anderson column once again raised identical accusations. The media lifted the tone by pointing to Cuba every time new evidence involving the establishment arose that Oswald did not act alone. It should be noted that during his career Anderson had at least been very close to the CIA. There was so much evidence that Congress decided to create its own Special Committee, headed by African-American Congressman Louis F. Stokes, to investigate the assassinations of John F. and Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King. After more than one year of arduous investigations the Stokes Committee arrived at interesting conclusions.

Among its findings Appendix C, Paragraph 2 states that on the basis of the available evidence the Cuban government was not involved in the assassination of President Kennedy.

After enquiries in the United States and in Cuba as to the motives for the assassination, President Kennedy’s intention to normalize relations with Cuba emerged, in addition to other no less significant reasons within internal politics.

IMMORAL CIA-MAFIA COLLUSION

The Special Committee reached the conclusion that Carlo Marcello, the capo of New Orleans and part of Texas; Santo Trafficante of Florida; and James Hoffa, president of the truck drivers’ trade union, had the motives, means and opportunity to assassinate President Kennedy.

Trafficante was a vital target in the Kennedy administration’s battle against organized crime. His name was among the 10 principal subjects to investigate and combat.

When Robert Kennedy found out about the CIA’s immoral collusion with the Mafia, he prohibited the officials involved from having recourse to such associations without informing him. But they continued doing so under the direction of Richard Helms.

The Committee report stated that Trafficante’s position in organized crime and drug trafficking and his role as the principal mafia link with criminal figures within the exile Cuban community, all furnished him with the capacity of organizing a conspiracy to assassinate President Kennedy, as he did previously in the case of Fidel Castro.

The Committee established that there was a possible connection between Trafficante and Jack Ruby, particularly in Havana in 1959, when Ruby was in fact acting as a courier in the interests of the Cosa Nostra for transferring funds from the Cuban capital to Miami. Cuba supplied the evidence of that.

However, the Committee was unable to find any direct evidence as to Trafficante’s or Marcello’s involvement in the assassination of the president. New Orleans, the imperial capital of the latter, had turned into a significant scenario of the terrorist conspiracies. Characters of the ilk of Orlando Bosch, Luis Posada Carriles, the Guillermo brothers and Ignacio Novo Sampoll, Eladio del Valle, Jorge Mas Canosa, Hermino Díaz and others used to go there.

The Special Committee also confirmed the theory that these terrorists of Cuban origin conspired as individuals for the commission of the crime. The same men who plotted to assassinate Fidel Castro did so to assassinate Kennedy. Shortly before being killed, John Roselli told columnist Jack Anderson that Cubans in Trafficante’s gang had taken part in the assassination.

The report concedes that the anti-Castroites were frustrated, embittered and angry and that their resentments were focused on Kennedy who, just before his death, had directed William Atwood to discuss the possibility of normalizing relations with Cuban representatives. The Cuban delegate to those talks was Carlos Lechuga, at that time UN ambassador. McGeorge Bundy, Kennedy’s security adviser, stated that the president wanted a report on the progress of the talks for when he returned from Dallas. Even after the death of his brother, Robert Kennedy also tried to suppress the anti-Cuba measures, but the new president, Lyndon Johnson, prevented it.

The Stokes Committee confirmed that Oswald’s contacts in the United States were counterrevolutionaries of Cuban origin and opted to openly look into these aspects, which had not been investigated by the CIA, closely involved with the Cuban-Americans. It decided to rigorously examine the groups that, apart from the motivation, had the capacity and the resources to be mixed up in the assassination.

There were many terrorist organizations in the period between the triumph of the Cuban Revolution and the assassination of Kennedy. But it was determined that there could have been a connection between Oswald and two of them: Alpha 66 and the Cuban Revolutionary Junta (JURE).

The Stokes Committee heard the testimony of Marita Lorenz, a beautiful spy recruited by Frank Sturgis, who recounted a meeting that she attended in Miami at the house of Orlando Bosch in which Pedro Luis Díaz Lanz and Oswald planned a visit to Dallas. She added that on November 15 she traveled to that city in a two-car caravan with Bosch, Sturgis, Díaz Lanz, Oswald, Gerry Hemmings and the Novo Sampoll brothers. There were various guns in the hotel rooms in which they stayed and they had a visit from Jack Ruby, subsequently Oswald’s executioner. More recently Lorenz stated that there Howard Hunt (Eduardo to the Cubans) handed money over to Sturgis on November 21 for an operation in an unstated locale and returned to Miami two or three hours after the assassination.

PHILLIPS, HANDLED THE DIRTY WORK

Antonio Veciano, the founder of Alpha 66, told the Committee that in the context of his activities against the Cuban government, he met on many occasions with a CIA official who gave his name as Bishop. And that in August 1963, in Dallas, Texas, the latter made contact with him in an office building, accompanied by a person whom he identified after the death of Kennedy as Lee Harvey Oswald.

Later Veciana confided to writer Gaeton Fonzi that Bishop’s real name was David Atlee Phillips who worked for the CIA in Havana under the cover of a businessman living in Apartment 502, 106, Humboldt Street.

From 1960, Atlee Phillips-Bishop was the Miami chief of propaganda for the ‘61 invasion of Cuba, together with Howard H. Hunt, the principal organizer of Watergate. In 1954, both of them succeeded in bringing down the Arbenz government in Guatemala. Cuban Security confirmed the identity of this CIA official, who organized the Cuban-American terrorist groups who, as late as 2003 were pressuring the Bush government to secure the release of Posada Carriles and his accomplices.

One of the members of the JURE group, Silvia Odio, testified in 1964 before the Warren Commission that a man whom she identified via the media as the Oswald who killed Kennedy, visited her apartment in Dallas in September 1963 with two other men of Latino appearance. She added that the two Spanish speakers told her that they were members of JURE.

One of them gave his name as Leopoldo and had a Cuban accent. The other, Angelo, seemed to be Mexican. The third introduced himself as León Oswald and was, for her, Lee Harvey Oswald. Cuban Security identified the other two as the Novo brothers, responsible for a long list of assassinations and other acts of terrorism.

Silvia gave the same testimony to the FBI and added that two days later, Leopoldo called her again and told that, according to León, they should have killed Kennedy after the failure of the Bay of Pigs invasion. Two months later Kennedy was assassinated.