Carlos
Lechuga was born in Cuba.
He worked as a journalist. A supporter of Fidel
Castro,
he became
Cuban Ambassador to the United Nations. He has carried out many diplomatic
missions representing Cuba in numerous international forums and conferences,
including the UN Committees on Human Rights, Disarmament and Racial
Discrimination.
In May, 1963, Lisa
Howard published
an article in the journal, War and Peace
Report, Howard wrote that in eight hours of private conversations
with Fidel
Castro
he had shown a strong desire
for negotiations with the United States: "In our conversations
he made it quite clear that he was ready to discuss: the Soviet personnel
and military hardware on Cuban soil; compensation for expropriated
American lands and investments; the question of Cuba as a base for
Communist subversion throughout the Hemisphere." Howard
went on to urge the Kennedy administration to "send an American
government official on a quiet mission to Havana to hear what Castro
has to say." A country as powerful as the United States, she
concluded, "has nothing to lose at a bargaining table with Fidel
Castro."
William
Attwood read
Howard's article and on 12th September, 1963, he had a long conversation
with her on the phone. This apparently set in motion a plan to initiate
secret talks between the United States and Cuba.
Six days later Attwood sent a memorandum to Under Secretary of State
Averell Harriman and U.N. Ambassador
Adlai Stevenson. Attwood asked for
permission to establish discreet, indirect contact with Fidel
Castro.
On September 20, John
F. Kennedy gave
permission to authorize Attwood's direct contacts with Carlos Lechuga.
According to Attwood: "I then told Miss Howard to set up the
contact, that is to have a small reception at her house so that it
could be done very casually, not as a formal approach by us."
Howard met Lechuga at the UN on 23rd September 23. Howard invited
Lechuga to come to a party at her Park Avenue apartment that night
to meet Attwood.
The next day William
Attwood met with Robert
Kennedy in
Washington and reported on the talks
with Lechuga. According to Attwood the attorney general believed that
a trip to Cuba would be "rather risky."
It was "bound to leak and... might result in some kind of Congressional
investigation." Nevertheless, he thought the matter was "worth
pursuing."
On 5th November 5, McGeorge
Bundy recorded that "the President was more in favor of pushing
towards an opening toward Cuba than was the State Department, the
idea being - well, getting them out of the Soviet fold and perhaps
wiping out the Bay of Pigs and maybe getting back into normal."
Bundy designated his assistant, Gordon Chase, to be Attwood's direct
contact at the White House.
Attwood continued to use
Lisa
Howard as
his contact with Fidel
Castro.
In October 1963, Castro told Howard that he was very keen to open
negotiations with Kennedy. Castro even offered to send a plane to
Mexico to pick up Kennedy's representative and fly him to a private
airport near Veradero where Castro would talk to him alone.
John
F. Kennedy
now decided to send William Attwood to
meet Castro. On 14th November, 1963, Lisa Howard conveyed this message
to her Cuban contact. In an attempt to show his good will, Kennedy
sent a coded message to Castro in a speech delivered on 19th November.
The speech included the following passage: "Cuba had become a
weapon in an effort dictated by external powers to subvert the other
American republics. This and this alone divides us. As long as this
is true, nothing is possible. Without it, everything is possible."
Kennedy also sent a message
to Fidel
Castro via
the French journalist Jean Daniel. According
to Daniel: "Kennedy expressed some empathy for Castro's anti-Americanism,
acknowledging that the United States had committed a number of sins
in pre-revolutionary Cuba." Kennedy told Daniel that the trade
embargo against Cuba could be lifted if Castro ended his support for
left-wing movements in the Americas.
At the time of Kennedy's
death, Lechuga had just received diplomatic instructions from Castro
on the agenda of a potential highlevel meeting between Cuban and U.S.
officials to discuss negotiations on improved relations.
In 1995 Wayne
Smith, chief of the Centre for International Policy in Washington,
arranged a meeting on the assassination of John
F. Kennedy,
in Nassau, Bahamas. Others in attendance were: Gaeton
Fonzi,
Dick
Russell, Noel Twyman,
Anthony
Summers,
Peter
Dale Scott,
Jeremy Gunn, John Judge, Andy Kolis, Peter Kornbluh, Mary and Ray
LaFontaine, Jim Lesar, John Newman, Alan Rogers, Russ Swickard, Ed
Sherry, and Gordon Winslow.
Some high-level
Cuban officials attended the conference. This included Carlos
Lechuga and Fabian
Escalante, a senior official in the Interior Ministry and
Arturo Rodriguez, a State Security official.
Carlos
Lechuga is also the author of In
the Eye of the Storm: Castro, Khrushchev,
Kennedy and the Missile Crisis (1995) and Cuba
and the Missile Crisis: Cuba's UN Envoy Tells the Inside Story
(2002).
Open
Debate on the Kennedy Assassination
(1)
Carlos
Lechuga, Cuban
Officials and JFK Historians Conference
(7th December,
1995)
He (Daniel) spoke with
Kennedy. He wanted to speak of Vietnam. Kennedy didn't want to talk
about Vietnam. He wanted to talk about Cuba and nothing else.
He (Daniel) went and spoke
with Castro and asked him: "How do you feel about the Missile
Crisis?" during this conversation is when they heard on the radio
that Kennedy was assassinated. Fidel in talking at a 1992 conference,
said that he had thought Daniel was serving as a messenger of Kennedy.
And he thought that Kennedy was capable and willing of changing his
policies. He was popular. He was in good position to make such a decision
to change his policies.
Kennedy speaking through
McGeorge Bundy said there should be an agenda for dialogue with Cuba.
Of course I sent all the information of these conversations with Attwood
to Havana. In Havana, the responses were delayed. According to Attwood's
perception, the responses were very slow. He wanted to accelerate
the process somewhat. Havana was moving too slowly. And at this moment,
without his knowledge, Lisa Howard called Cuba and spoke with Commandante
Vallejo, who was the assistant to Fidel Castro. In order to try and
accelerate the process. She had known him in Cuba before. To try to
take advantage of her friendship with him, in order to try to get
a quicker response from the Cubans. In November, Vallejo was contacted
Lechuga and told me they are working on the agenda. But the agenda
never really arrived because they killed Kennedy. Attwood said that
JFK said through somebody, maybe McGeorge Bundy, that Kennedy had
left a note for himself on his desk that upon his return from Dallas
to contact Attwood to find out how the Cuban initiative was going...
They were discussing, considering the questions. Considering formulating
agenda. Then they killed Kennedy.
(2)
Peter Kornbluh , JFK
& Castro: The Secret Quest For Accommodation (October
1999)
In February
1996, Robert Kennedy Jr. and his brother, Michael, traveled to Havana
to meet with Fidel Castro. As a gesture of goodwill, they brought
a file of formerly top secret US documents on the Kennedy administration's
covert exploration of an accommodation with Cuba - a record of what
might have been had not Lee Harvey Oswald, seemingly believing the
president to be an implacable foe of Castro's Cuba, fired his fateful
shots in Dallas. Castro thanked them for the file and shared his "impression
that it was (President Kennedy's) intention after the missile crisis
to change the framework" of relations between the United States
and Cuba. "It's unfortunate," said Castro, that "things
happened as they did, and he could not do what he wanted to do."
Would John F. Kennedy, had he lived, have been able to establish a
modus vivendi with Fidel Castro? The question haunts almost 40 years
of acrimonious U.S.-Cuba relations. In a Top Secret - Eyes Only memorandum
written three days after the president's death, one of his White House
aides, Gordon Chase, noted that "President Kennedy could have
accommodated with Castro and gotten away with it with a minimum of
domestic heat"--because of his track record "of being successfully
nasty to Castro and the Communists" during the 1962 Cuban missile
crisis. Castro and his advisers believed the same. A CIA intelligence
report, based on a high-level Cuban source and written for National
Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy in 1964, noted that "Fidel Castro
felt that it was possible that President Kennedy would have gone on
ultimately to negotiate with Cuba... (as an) acceptance of a fait
accompli for practical reasons."
The file on the Kennedy administration's "Cuban contacts"
that Robert Jr. and Michael took to Cuba (declassified at the request
of the author) sheds significant light on a story that has never been
fully told - John Kennedy's secret pursuit of a rapprochement with
Fidel Castro. Along with papers recently released pursuant to the
Kennedy Assassination Records Act of 1992, the documents reveal the
escalating efforts toward negotiations in 1963 that, if successful,
might have changed the ensuing decades of perpetual hostility between
Washington and Havana. Given the continuing state of tension with
Castro's regime, this history carries an immediate relevance for present
policy makers. Indeed, with the Clinton administration buffeted between
increasingly vocal critics of US policy toward Cuba and powerful proponents
of the status quo, reconstructing the hitherto secret record of Kennedy's
efforts in the fall of 1963 to advance "the rapprochement track"
with Castro is more relevant than ever.
John F. Kennedy
would seem the most unlikely of presidents to seek an accommodation
with Fidel Castro. His tragically abbreviated administration bore
responsibility for some of the most infamous US efforts to roll back
the Cuban revolution: the Bay of Pigs invasion, the trade embargo,
Operation Mongoose (a US plan to destabilize the Castro government)
and a series of CIA-Mafia assassination attempts against the Cuban
leader. Castro's demise, Seymour M. Hersh argues in his book, The
Dark Side of Camelot, "became a presidential obsession"
until the end. "The top priority in the United States government
- all else is secondary - no time, money, effort, or manpower is to
be spared" is to find a "solution" to the Cuba problem,
Attorney General Robert Kennedy told a high-level group of CIA and
Pentagon officials in early 1962. The president's opinion, according
to CIA minutes of the meeting, was that "the final chapter (on
Cuba) has not been written."
Unbeknownst
to all but his brother and a handful of advisers, however, in 1963
John Kennedy began pursuing an alternative script on Cuba: a secret
dialogue toward an actual rapprochement with Castro. To a policy built
upon "overt and covert nastiness," as Top Secret White House
memoranda characterized US operations against Cuba, was added "the
sweet approach," meaning the possibility of "quietly enticing
Castro over to us." National Security Council officials referred
to this multitrack policy as "simil-opting"--the use of
disparate methods toward the goal of moving Cuba out of the Soviet
orbit...
Which country
initiated the secret dialogue in the fall of 1963 remains a subject
of historical dispute. The feelers toward a rapprochement "originally
came, one might say, from their side," testified William Attwood,
the key US official involved in the subsequent talks, in a top secret
deposition in 1975. In an interview, Cuba's former ambassador to the
United Nations, Carlos Lechuga, insisted that "this was a Kennedy
initiative, not Cuba's."
(3)
The
Miami Herald (August, 1999)
It was March
1963, the height of the Cold War - a time of covert US government
assassination plots against Fidel Castro, Kennedy administration-sponsored
exile raids and sabotage missions directed at Cuba.
It was also
a time when Castro - still smarting from Moscow's failure to consult
him about the withdrawal of missiles from the island in 1962 - was
sending feelers to Washington about Cuba's interest in rapprochement.
President
John F. Kennedy responded by overruling the State Department's position
that Cuba break its ties with Soviet bloc nations as a precondition
for talks on normal relations, according to an account to be published
this week in the October issue of Cigar Aficionado magazine.
"The
President himself is very interested in this one,'' says a March 1963
top-secret White House memo. ``The President does not agree that we
should make the breaking of Sino-Soviet ties a non-negotiable point.
We don't want to present Castro with a condition that he obviously
cannot fulfill. We should start thinking along more flexible lines.''
The article,
JFK and Castro: The Secret Quest for Accommodation, is based
on recently declassified documents and written by Peter Kornbluh,
a senior analyst at the Washington-based National Security Archive,
a nongovernmental research institute. It traces the secret U.S.-Cuban
contacts during the last months of the Kennedy administration and
into the Johnson administration.
Although the
general outlines of the contacts have been known, the account adds
considerable detail, particularly the key role played by the late
ABC correspondent Lisa Howard, who interviewed Castro in April 1963.
In addition
to Howard, key players were McGeorge Bundy, the Kennedy and Johnson
administrations' national security advisor, his assistant Gordon Chase
and William Attwood, former Look magazine editor who at the time was
an advisor to the US mission at the United Nations.
On the Cuban
side, the principal players were Carlos Lechuga, Cuba's UN ambassador,
and Rene Vallejo, Castro's personal physician.
Initial overtures
from Castro to Washington in late 1962 had been made through New York
lawyer James Donovan, who had been enlisted by the Kennedy administration
to negotiate the release of Bay of Pigs prisoners.
Efforts at
normalization languished, however, until the involvement of Howard
and Attwood started to bear fruit in the latter part of 1963.
In September,
Attwood was authorized to have direct contacts with Lechuga, which
were arranged by Howard at a Sept. 23 reception in her New York apartment.
Attwood was to subsequently confer with Vallejo by telephone from
Howard's apartment or she would relay messages between the two.
At one point,
Vallejo conveyed a message to Attwood through Howard that said, "Castro
would like to talk to the US official anytime and appreciates the
importance of discretion to all concerned. Castro would therefore
be willing to send a plane to Mexico to pick up the official and fly
him to a private airport near Varadero where Castro would talk to
him alone. The plane would fly him back immediately.''
The invitation
touched off a debate within the White House, with President Kennedy's
position being that "it did not seem practicable'' to send an
American official to Cuba "at this stage.''
Even so, the
contacts continued to gain momentum until Kennedy's assassination
on Nov. 22, 1963, when the "Attwood-Lechuga tie line'' was put
on hold, with White House aides concerned that assassin Lee Harvey
Oswald's reported pro-Castro sympathies would make an accommodation
more difficult.
The back-channel
contacts continued under President Lyndon Johnson through 1964, according
to Kornbluh, but fizzled out in late 1964 as the fall presidential
elections approached, despite ongoing efforts by Howard to keep them
alive.
In December
1964, Howard made her final and unsuccessful effort by trying to arrange
a meeting in New York between US officials and Ernesto "Che''
Guevara, the Argentine-born Cuban revolutionary.
(4)
Julian Borger, The
Guardian (26th November, 2003)
A few days
before his assassination, President Kennedy was planning a meeting
with Cuban officials to negotiate the normalisation of relations with
Fidel Castro, according to a newly declassified tape and White House
documents.
The rapprochement was cut off in Dallas 40 years ago this week by
Lee Harvey Oswald, who appears to have believed he was assassinating
the president in the interests of the Cuban revolution.
But the new
evidence suggests that Castro saw Kennedy's killing as a setback.
He tried to restart a dialogue with the next administration, but Lyndon
Johnson was at first too concerned about appearing soft on communism
and later too distracted by Vietnam to respond.
A later attempt
to restore normal relations by President Carter was defeated by a
rightwing backlash, and since then any move towards lifting the Cuban
trade embargo has been opposed by Cuban exile groups, who wield disproportionate
political power from Florida.
Peter Kornbluh,
a researcher at Washington's National Security Archives who has reviewed
the new evidence, said: "It shows that the whole history of US-Cuban
relations might have been quite different if Kennedy had not been
assassinated."
Castro and
Kennedy's tentative flirtation came at a time of extraordinary acrimony
in the wake of US-backed Bay of Pigs invasion by Cuban exiles and
the missile crisis which led the world to the brink of nuclear war.
It began with
a secret and highly unorthodox dialogue conducted through an intrepid
journalist and former soap-opera actor and involved plans to fly a
US diplomat from Mexico to Cuba for a clandestine face-to-face meeting
with Castro alone in an aircraft hangar.
On a newly
declassified Oval Office audiotape, recorded only 17 days before the
assassination, Kennedy can be heard discussing the option with his
national security adviser, McGeorge Bundy.
The president
agrees in principle to send an American diplomat, Bill Attwood, who
had once interviewed Castro during a former career as a journalist,
but he fretted that news of the secret mission would leak out. At
one point Kennedy asks: "Can't we get Mr Attwood off the payroll?"
If the diplomat was no longer on staff the whole trip would be deniable
if it came to light.
Kennedy had
been thinking about reopening relations with Havana since spring that
year.
The key intermediary
was Lisa Howard, an actor who had become a leading television journalist
when she managed to land an interview with the Soviet leader, Nikita
Krushchev.
In April 1963,
she scored another coup - an interview with Castro, and returned with
a message for the Kennedy administration, that the Cuban leader was
anxious to talk. The message launched a frantic period of diplomacy,
recounted in a television documentary broadcast last night on the
Discovery Times channel, entitled "A President, A Revolutionary,
A Reporter".
The president
was receptive. The CIA was pursuing various schemes aimed at assassinating
or undermining Castro, but Kennedy's aides were increasingly convinced
Havana could be weaned away from Moscow.
In one memorandum
a senior White House aide, Gordon Chase, says: "We have not yet
looked seriously at the other side of the coin - quietly enticing
Castro over to us," instead of looking at ways to hurt him.
According
to Mr Bundy, Kennedy "was more in favour of pushing towards an
opening toward Cuba than was the state department, the idea being...
getting them out of the Soviet fold and perhaps wiping out the Bay
of Pigs and getting back to normal".
The administration
gave a nod to Ms Howard, who set up a chance meeting between Mr Attwood
and the Cuban ambassador to the UN, Carlos Lechuga, at a cocktail
party in her Park Avenue apartment.
The apartment
then became a communications centre between Mr Attwood and the Castro
regime. Castro's aide, Dr Rene Vallejo, called at pre-arranged times
to talk to Mr Attwood, and in the autumn of 1963 suggested that Mr
Attwood fly to Mexico from where he would be picked up by a plane
sent by Castro. The plane would take him to a private airport near
Veradero, Cuba, where the Cuban leader would talk to him alone in
a hangar. He would be flown back after the talks.
Kennedy and
Bundy discuss the plan on the tape on November 5. The national security
adviser does much of the talking but the president is clearly worried
that the trip will be leaked. First he suggests taking Mr Attwood
off the state department payroll, but later he decided even that was
too risky. Instead, he suggested DR Vallejo fly to the UN for a confidential
meeting to discuss the agenda of direct talks with Castro.
The plan,
however, was sunk by the assassination. Ms Howard continued to bring
messages back to Washington from Castro, in which the Cuban leader
expresses his support for President Johnson's 1964 election and even
offers to turn the other cheek if the new US leader wanted to indulge
in some electoral Cuba-bashing. But the Johnson White House was far
more cautious. The new president did not have the cold war credentials
of having faced down the Soviet Union over the Cuban missile crisis.
The moment had passed.
(5)
National
Security Archive (24th November, 2003)
On the 40th
anniversary of the assassination of John F. Kennedy, and the eve of
the broadcast of a new documentary film on Kennedy and Castro, the
National Security Archive today posted an audio tape of the President
and his national security advisor, McGeorge Bundy, discussing the
possibility of a secret meeting in Havana with Castro. The tape, dated
only seventeen days before Kennedy was shot in Dallas, records a briefing
from Bundy on Castro's invitation to a US official at the United Nations,
William Attwood, to come to Havana for secret talks on improving relations
with Washington. The tape captures President Kennedy's approval if
official US involvement could be plausibly denied.
The possibility
of a meeting in Havana evolved from a shift in the President's thinking
on the possibility of what declassified White House records called
"an accommodation with Castro" in the aftermath of the Cuban
Missile Crisis. Proposals from Bundy's office in the spring of 1963
called for pursuing "the sweet approach…enticing Castro
over to us," as a potentially more successful policy than CIA
covert efforts to overthrow his regime. Top Secret White House memos
record Kennedy's position that "we should start thinking along
more flexible lines" and that "the president, himself, is
very interested in (the prospect for negotiations)." Castro,
too, appeared interested. In a May 1963 ABC News special on Cuba,
Castro told correspondent Lisa Howard that he considered a rapprochement
with Washington "possible if the United States government wishes
it. In that case," he said, "we would be agreed to seek
and find a basis" for improved relations.
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