'Castro had Kennedy killed'
03/01/2006 22:20 - (SA)
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Berlin - A German documentary to be aired this week claims to have found new evidence that Lee Harvey Oswald shot United States president John F Kennedy on the orders of the Cuban secret services.
Award-winning German filmmaker Wilfried Huismann said: "It was (Cuban leader Fidel) Castro's vengeance for the CIA bid to assassinate him with a poisoned pen."
Huismann's film, Rendezvous with Death, featured 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.
Cuban missile crisis
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 claimed in his film that Kennedy's successor, President Lyndon B Johnson, knew about the plot, but wanted to avoid a new stand-off 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 was also based on testimony by former Russian and US secret agents and files from the defunct Soviet secret service, the KGB.
'Castro had Kennedy killed'
