CARLOS ALBERTO MONTANER:

I despise conspiracy theories, but sometimes one has to surrender to the evidence. With abundant proof at hand, German documentary filmmaker Wilfried Huismann has attributed to Fidel Castro the responsibility for the assassination of President John F. Kennedy on Nov. 22, 1963.

Shown for the first time on German public TV, the documentary, Rendezvous with Death: Castro and Kennedy, contributes several documents and some testimony that are newsworthy. But its most convincing element is a report from Mexican intelligence that states that in September 1963 Lee Harvey Oswald received in Mexico $6,500 from the Cuban secret services to help him carry out the planned crime.

Oscar Marino -- a former officer in Cuba's state security apparatus, now elderly and in exile -- corroborated the research done by the German filmmaker: ''He offered to kill Kennedy, and we used him,'' he told Huismann.

This is not the first time that this theory is put forward. Jackie Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, two of the people closest to the late president, believed it firmly but withheld their certainty to avoid provoking another incident with the Soviet Union. Had they revealed their well-founded suspicions at that time, and given the indignation that filled U.S. society, an invasion of Cuba to punish the guilty would have been inevitable. But the shaken White House did not wish another dangerous confrontation with the Kremlin similar to the one in October 1962 that brought the planet to the brink of nuclear war.

Bobby Kennedy, then U.S. attorney general, surely shared the same suspicion, but it wasn't to his advantage to accuse Castro. In the end, it seems that the Cuban dictator -- as he told the Brazilian ambassador in Havana a few days before the crime -- was responding in that manner to the assassination attempts organized by the president's brother, with the help of the Mafia.

Read the rest.

Click here to send me an email