John F Kennedy assassination: Cuba lay behind the 1963 assassination of president John F Kennedy by Lee Harvey Oswald and its agents provided the gunman with money and support, an award-winning German director says in a new documentary film.
Wilfried Huismann spent three years researching Rendezvous with Death, based on interviews with former Cuban secret agents, US officials and a Russian intelligence source, and on research in Mexican security archives.
The film, shown to journalists in Berlin yesterday, says Oswald travelled to Mexico City by bus in September 1963, seven weeks before the Kennedy shooting, and met agents at the Cuban embassy there who paid him $6,500.
Oscar Marino, a former Cuban agent and a key source for the documentary, told Huismann that Oswald himself had volunteered for the assassination mission. "He hated his country . . . Oswald offered to kill Kennedy," Marino said in the film. "He was so full of hate, he had the idea. We used him . . . He was a tool." He said he knew with certainty that the assassination was an operation of the Cuban secret service G-2.
Huismann also unearthed a US intelligence report which said Cuban secret service chief Fabian Escalante flew to Dallas on the day of Kennedy's assassination, and back again the same day.
Tracked down by the film-maker, Escalante denied he had been in Dallas and evaded questions about Cuba's alleged role. "What is truth, what are lies?" he said, smiling. - (Reuters)