Four men of Cuban origin living in Florida, apparently tourists, visited – in September 1963 – a young American who was staying in room 18 of the “Hotel Del Comercio” in Mexico City. Today, sixty years later, new declassified cables reveal that the guest they met was Lee Harvey Oswald the man who went down in history for being the author of the murder of the president of the United States John F. Kennedy.
The documents, which detail several public meetings between the Cubans and Oswald, have been declassified in 2023 by the president’s administration. Joe Biden. They are reports prepared by the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) when interrogating at least three Mexicans who witnessed those meetings.
Ernesto Lima Juárez, A contractor who at that time lived in Tamaulipas, explained that one of the Cubans was “a white man, between 55 and 56 years old, 1.76 meters tall, with a thin complexion and graying hair,” notes one of the cables. declassified whose copy you have HIGH LEVEL.
The person questioned clarified that he had no association with the Cubans, although one of his friends, named Francisco Morales, He did have drinks with them on one or two occasions. According to this testimony, the meetings held by Lee Harvey Oswald with the Cubans “appeared to be social in nature.”
After the assassination of President Kennedy, which occurred on November 22, 1963 in Dallas, Texas, the CIA carried out an exhaustive investigation into Oswald’s trip to our country 57 days before the assassination. The details of that visit were partially revealed a couple of decades ago, also from declassified cables.
Lee Harvey Oswald, then 24 years old, did not come to Mexico for pleasure; his intention was to obtain a transit visa at the Cuban Consulate to travel to the island, and from there move to the Soviet Union, for which he also went to the Embassy of that nation now disappeared.
In both procedures he failed, although when carrying them out He had contact with at least 35 people who were later interviewed by the CIA. Added to these testimonies is the information provided to that Agency by the Mexican Federal Directorate of Security (DFS), a department of the Ministry of the Interior that made several arrests in order to obtain the statements of those who dealt with Oswald.
Cuban exiles, mafia and mercenaries
Another of the new declassified cables recounts the details of a meeting held in 1969 by the then president of Cuba, Fidel Castro, with “a group of American radicals.”
The informant, identified as L/1, reveals that at the meeting the president “spoke with them for two hours about the fact that a single assassin could not have killed Kennedy.”
He adds that “Castro ordered a reenactment of the crime, using his best shooters, and they could not duplicate what Lee Harvey Oswald is supposed to have done by himself” alone.
L/1 He also told the CIA that Three groups were involved in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy: “A group of Cubans, a group of “mafiosi” and a third group of mercenaries. The third group included a man with a Greek name.”
This is not the first time that the possibility that Kennedy’s murder was a plot in which several of the US president’s enemies participated has been mentioned. This is a hypothesis that was even presented at a trial in 1966 by the New Orleans prosecutor. Jim Garrison.
However, the three official investigations carried out by the United States government concluded that Lee Harvey Oswald was the only assassin, who in turn was deprived of his life by Jack Rubytwo days after the tragic events, on November 24, 1963.
Meeting with students
Among the 2,672 documents declassified this year is also a cable in which an informant, of American origin, tells the CIA that a friend met Oswald at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM).
“He described Oswald as “weird” and “introverted,” a person who obviously had complexes and problems,” it states. The source tells the CIA that Lee would have gone to the UNAM Faculty of Philosophy in search of pro-Castro students, who “could help him persuade the Cuban Embassy to grant him a visa.”
The CIA had been tracking Oswald since 1959, although, immediately after the assassination, the Agency said it did not have information about who – in the end – became one of the most enigmatic characters of the Cold War.
Today we know that on his trip to Mexico he visited, in addition to the diplomatic and consular legation of Cuba, the Embassy of the Soviet Union, where he chatted with the KGB officer, Valeriy Vladimirovich Kostikov, who was accredited to the Mexican government as a vice consul and not as a spy.
Until now, it is not known for sure whether it was real that Lee Harvey Oswald wanted to return to the Soviet Union through Cuba, traveling to the island from Mexico. The assassin had lived in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics between 1959 and 1961, where he even renounced his American nationality.
Presumably repentant, and married to Marina Nikolayevna Prusakova, He managed to recover his passport and return to the American Union, and immediately participated in the “Fair Play for Cuba Committee”, a group that supported the Cuban Revolution. All of these contradictions have not been fully explained 12 decades later, since the CIA still has thousands of documents that it refuses to declassify.
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Surya Palacios Journalist and lawyer, specialist in legal and human rights analysis. She has been a reporter, radio host and editor.