A German documentary to be aired this week claims to have found new evidence that Lee Harvey Oswald shot United States president John Kennedy on the orders of the Cuban secret services.
”It was [Cuban leader Fidel] Castro’s vengeance for the CIA bid to assassinate him with a poisoned pen,” award-winning German filmmaker Wilfried Huismann says in the film that will be aired on ARD television on Friday.
Huismann’s film, Rendezvous with Death, features claims by a disgruntled former ally of Castro, Oscar Marino, that Oswald had assassinated Kennedy in a plot hatched by the Cuban secret services in the US state of Florida.
According to the film, Marino fell out with Castro because he believed the communist leader was too close to Moscow.
The theory of Cuban involvement was mooted after Kennedy was shot dead in Dallas, Texas on November 22 1963, one year after the Cuban missile crisis, but largely dismissed.
Huismann claims in his film that Kennedy’s successor, President Lyndon Johnson, knew about the plot but wanted to avoid a new standoff with Cuba, partly because the US Democrats were seen as incapable of controlling the Castro regime.
The film also sheds a different light on Oswald, with one of the investigators who questioned him saying he was not the neurotic loner people believed but a cultured man who was fanatically anti-American.
Huismann said that he did three years of research for the documentary, which is also based on testimony by former Russian and US secret agents and files from the defunct Soviet secret service, the KGB. – Sapa-AFP