CU US-Cuba 1963
26 Nov 2003

The Guardian - Days before his assassination, president John F. Kennedy was planning a meeting with Cuban officials to negotiate the normalisation of relations with Fidel Castro, a declassified tape and White House documents reveal. The rapprochement was cut off in Dallas 40 years ago 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 Dr Castro saw Kennedy's killing as a setback. He sought 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. Peter Kornbluh, a researcher at Washington's National Security Archives, said the new evidence "shows that the whole history of US-Cuban relations might have been quite different if Kennedy had not been assassinated".

Dr Castro's and JFK's tentative flirtation came at a time of extraordinary acrimony in the wake of the US-backed Bay of Pigs invasion by Cuban exiles and the missile crisis that led the world to the brink of nuclear war. On a newly declassified Oval Office audiotape, recorded 17 days before the assassination, Kennedy is heard discussing the option of a meeting with his national security adviser, McGeorge Bundy. The president agrees in principle to send a US diplomat, Bill Attwood, but frets that news of the secret mission could leak out. The key intermediary was Lisa Howard, an actress who had become a leading television journalist when she landed an interview with the Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev. In April 1963 she interviewed Dr Castro, and returned with a message that the Cuban leader was anxious to talk. The president was receptive. The CIA was pursuing various schemes aimed at assassinating or undermining Dr Castro, but Kennedy's aides were increasingly convinced Havana could be weaned away from Moscow.

The administration gave a nod to Ms Howard, who set up a meeting between Mr Attwood and the Cuban ambassador to the UN, Carlos Lechuga. Her flat then became a communications centre between Mr Attwood and the Castro regime. Dr Castro's aide, Dr Rene Vallejo, called at arranged times to talk to Mr Attwood, and in the northern autumn of 1963 suggested Mr Attwood fly to Mexico and on to Cuba, where the Cuban leader would talk to him alone in a hangar. The plan, however, was sunk by the assassination. Ms Howard continued to ferry messages from Dr Castro, in which the Cuban leader expresses his support for 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 new president did not have the Cold War credentials of having faced down Moscow over the Cuban missile crisis. The moment had passed.