Not in Your Lifetime: The Defining Book on the J.F.K. Assassination (41 page)

After November 22, Martino was at the forefront of efforts to suggest that Cuba was behind the assassination. He was a prime source, perhaps the originator, of the story that Oswald had been involved in pro-Castro activity not only in New Orleans but in Florida. He claimed that Oswald, rather than merely visiting Mexico City, had flown secretly to Cuba—and been paid by Castro to shoot Kennedy. Pressed to reveal his source, Martino named him as Oscar Ortiz, a member of an anti-Castro group “too sensitive to name.” The FBI could locate no “Ortiz,” and there the matter ended.

What Martino said in private to those he knew well was the exact opposite of his time-wasting exercise in pointing the blame at Castro for the murder of the President. In a exchange after the assassination, he made a brief comment to John Cummings, a young reporter he had come to trust following his release from jail in Cuba. He said, Cummings told the author, that “there had been two guns, two people involved” in Dallas… . “When I asked if anti-Castro Cubans were involved, he said, ‘That’s right.’ But very often with Martino, you knew there wasn’t any point in asking more.”

Martino brought the subject up again only many years later, in 1975, when he was suffering from heart disease. “I called him in the spring,” Cummings said, “and he told me he was ailing, and I went to see him. And he came out with a mea culpa about JFK. He told me he’d been part of the assassination of Kennedy. He wasn’t in Dallas pulling a trigger, but he was involved. He implied that his role was delivering money, facilitating things… . He asked me not to write it while he was alive.”

Cummings kept his word, not least perhaps because, the last time he saw Martino alive, Trafficante’s former associate came up with what amounted to a diversion—an assertion that he had in 1963 himself met Oswald in the company of an FBI agent named “Connors.” Former agent James O’Connor, the record shows, had been one of those to whom—soon after the assassination—Martino had spun his “Oswald-the-Castro-agent” line.
7

Also months before he died, however, he told a close business associate named Fred Claasen that he had personal knowledge of a plot behind the President’s assassination. As reported in the chapter of this book that deals with the shooting of Officer Tippit, Martino said: “The anti-Castro people put Oswald together. Oswald didn’t know who he was working for—he was just ignorant of who was really putting him together. Oswald was to meet his contact at the Texas Theater [the movie house where Oswald was arrested]. They were to meet Oswald in the theater and get him out of the country, then eliminate him. Oswald made a mistake… . There was no way we could get to him. They had Ruby kill him.”
8

A further, and final, detail came to the author from Martino’s widow, Florence. Right after the assassination, she recalled, her husband told her, “When [the police] went to the theater and got Oswald, they blew it… . There was a Cuban in there. They let him come out.” He said, “They let the guy go, the other trigger.”
9

Coming, as the allegation did, from a man who had been close to Mafia boss
Trafficante and deeply involved with the anti-Castro movement, was this make-believe? Or did it, perhaps, reflect what really happened?

An anti-Castro Cuban, a man with a known record as an assassin—and a connection to Mob boss Santo Trafficante—reportedly did claim to have fired at the President on November 22. Fresh information, published here for the first time, surfaced in 2007 in an unexpected call to former House Assassinations Committee Chief Counsel Robert Blakey. Eighty-one-year-old Reinaldo Martínez Gomez, himself a Cuban exile living in Miami, said he had information he wished to share before he died. Professor Blakey, together with this author, listened to the essence of Martínez’s account, then flew to Florida to question him in detail and tape an interview.

Martínez wanted to talk about a man who had been his best friend when they were both students in Cuba, Herminio Díaz García. They had been “inseparable,” going fishing, attending cockfights—a national pastime in that country—and practicing shooting. Díaz was fascinated by guns, and became quite a marksman. The two friends’ paths in life diverged. Martínez went to work in a hardware store and wound up running it. Díaz was “very quiet, introverted—and exceptionally brave,” but showed little interest in a conventional career. The one thing he was professional about, his friend told us, was “in the use of firearms. He was passionate about shooting, whether with rifle or pistol. This was his obsession—he always had one [a weapon] with him.”

It is a matter of record that in the late 1940s, in Mexico, Díaz murdered a former Cuban police chief.
Several years later, he attempted to assassinate the President of Costa Rica. In the late 1950s, according to Martínez, he plotted to kill the Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista.
10
Over a period, his friend thought, Díaz probably murdered twenty people.

Martínez told the author, and a CIA document suggests, that Díaz returned to Cuba at the time of the 1959 revolution. He may have joined Castro’s forces for a while. What seems to have motivated him, though, was less political fervor than a desire to be behind a gun and—in Martínez’s opinion—money. Martínez’s recollections, and the U.S. government record, show that Díaz at once point headed security at Havana’s Riviera Hotel and casino. In other words, he too worked for Santo Trafficante.

Several times in 1959, Díaz—who at the time had no car—asked Martínez to drive him to the detention camp where the Mob boss was being held. “I went there with Herminio five or six times,” Martínez recalled, “and there was a waiting room where I sat while he went in to see Trafficante. On one of the visits, I noticed a particular man—he caught my attention because in Cuba in July or August it is really hot, and this man was dressed in a double-breasted woolen suit and felt hat. [When] I asked Herminio, ‘
Chico
, is he mad?’, he told me it was Jack Ruby, a friend of Santo, who had come to see him.” As Ruby had indeed visited, as described in the preceding chapter of this book. “The image of that man dressed that way in a climate as hot as it gets in Cuba stayed with me, and came back to me again when I saw Ruby kill Lee Harvey Oswald in Dallas… . It looked like he still hadn’t taken off the suit.”

Trafficante was released from the camp soon afterward. His reward was to be given a new job as head of security at the casino. Soon enough, however, the rush of events separated Martínez and
Díaz. Díaz’s job ended when Castro shut down gambling altogether, and he eventually left on a merchant ship. Martínez, who was to be in and out of Castro’s prisons—he said on currency offenses—never saw his friend alive again.

Martínez was in jail several years later, in early June 1966, when officials rousted him out late one night to show him a mugshot of Díaz and ask him to identify it. When Martínez replied that the picture was of his friend Díaz, they retorted: “He
was
your friend”—then showed him a photo of Díaz’s bloodied corpse on a stretcher. Díaz had been killed, documents and press coverage confirm (see facsimile below) during a failed raid in which he and a comrade had intended to kill Castro. Martínez’s name had been found on a list in Díaz’s pocket.

That would have been the end of it, Martínez said, were it not that—several months later—the man who had led the raid in which Díaz died, Tony Cuesta, wound up in the same prison as Martínez. Cuesta was recovering from terrible injuries he had suffered before being captured—the loss of an arm, virtually total sight loss, and hearing problems. It was to Martínez, who was assigned to work in the infirmary, that he came for minor treatment. The two men discovered that they had something in common, a long acquaintance with the dead man they had both known as “
Herminito.”

One day, Martínez said, Cuesta told him something he would never forget. He spoke of the night of the failed exile raid, of how he and Díaz had sat talking in the boat waiting for the tide to be right for a landing. Then, as Martínez recalled it in his interview with Blakey and the author:
“Que Herminio le había confesado a él, a Tony Cuesta, que Herminio había tenido participación en la muerte del Presidente de Los Estados Unidos.”
(Herminio had confessed to him, to Tony Cuesta, that Herminio had taken part in the death of the President of the United States.)

Cuesta did not elaborate and—according to Martínez—he did not press him. “I had learned to be very reserved in prison. Aside from the fact that I was with Tony Cuesta, there [in prison] you couldn’t converse with your own shadow. I didn’t pressure him to tell me more… . We spoke of other things… . I think in that moment he had not been lying to me… . I don’t believe he had any reason to lie to me. Because, given the state he was in [with his wounds], I don’t think a man makes things up.”

Had Martínez believed Díaz took part in the President’s assassination? “I did not believe it and neither did I disbelieve it. Because I had no evidence—to know whether it was true.”

Martínez and his family left Cuba for Florida some thirteen years later, in the Mariel boatlift of 1980. In Miami, when he went to see Remigio “Cucú” Arce, an old friend from Cuba back in the 1940s, he got what appeared to be confirmation of what he had heard from Cuesta. In his cups one day, Arce, who had known Herminio Díaz García well—it was he who had introduced Martínez to Díaz in the first place—confided: “Listen, the one who killed the President was our little friend.” Which little friend? “Herminio.”

Troubled,
Martínez told the author, he had gone to the FBI to report what he had been told. The agent with whom he spoke did not seem interested.

Martínez has died since being interviewed, and there is no way now to assess the credibility of his account. The principal source he cited, the prominent exile activist Tony Cuesta, died in 1992. Remigio Arce is dead, too.

The strength of Martínez’s account lies in the fact that his friend Herminio Díaz García did have a known track record as an assassin. The record shows, moreover, that he was an associate of Santo Trafficante and was involved in the struggle against Castro. There is a possible weakness to his account, however. Long before Martínez linked Díaz to President Kennedy’s assassination, researchers had heard it from a Castro official. In the 1990s, former Cuban intelligence chief Fabián Escalante informed researchers that Cuesta had told him of Díaz’s supposed role in the assassination shortly before his release from prison in 1978.
11
Martínez, moreover, discussed Cuesta’s claim with Escalante—he told the author—when he revisited Cuba in 2005.

Those who believe Castro had a hand in the Kennedy assassination will see Martínez’s account as merely a further piece of Cuban propaganda, disinformation designed to deflect suspicion away from Havana. When the author put this to Martínez, he just shrugged. He was telling the story now, he said, because he was nearing the end of his life and because: “
Es
la verdad—mi verdad.
It is the truth—my truth.”

Truth was always a commodity in short supply where exile groups and their CIA backers were concerned. At the center of the fog of unknowns, now as then, are the roles of the CIA and the DRE, the militant exile group that had that strangely stagey clash with Oswald in New Orleans.

The DRE, in the words of an
Agency memorandum, had been “conceived, created, and funded by the CIA.” By 1963, it funded the DRE to the tune of $51,000 a month—or $385,000 at today’s rates—regularly delivered to the group’s leaders in a brown paper bag. A problem had arisen, however. Not satisfied with a psychological warfare role, the group’s leaders insisted on taking the paramilitary fight against Castro—even when doing so conflicted with Kennedy administration policy. A new CIA case officer, appointed in the months before the President’s assassination, had the task of trying to steer the DRE away from military activity and towards political action and intelligence collection.

This fit well with the way the exiles of the DRE handled Lee Oswald in New Orleans. There was the street confrontation, a visit to Oswald’s apartment by a DRE man posing as a fellow supporter of Castro, and a call for congressional investigation of Oswald.
12
Then, within hours of Oswald’s arrest after the assassination, there was a DRE information blitz to hammer home the message that the killer was a leftist supporter of Fidel Castro.

The CIA did not inform the Warren Commission that it had created and subsidized the DRE, even though the group’s connection to Oswald was potentially of great significance.
13
The Agency’s behavior toward the House Assassinations Committee in the matter, meanwhile, amounted to downright obstruction.

The Committee pursued its numerous requests to the CIA under a working arrangement negotiated by Chief Counsel Robert Blakey, an arrangement that—in theory—offered better access to Agency material than that enjoyed by any previous congressional probe. As things turned out, however, Committee staff found themselves frustrated by procrastination and an “inability to find” what was requested. Two investigators became so desperate to get responses to their requests, they told the author, that they would arrive at CIA headquarters before the liaison office opened and leave only when it closed.