Oswald's Tale (70 page)

5

Fair Play for Cuba

As Lee and Marina come together and draw apart, the question of whether she should return to Russia has become one of the recurring elements in their marriage. Whenever he is most vexed, he threatens to dispatch her back. In October of 1962, hardly three months after they have returned to America, the theme is introduced, and on Elsbeth Street, he has her applying to the Soviet Consulate in Washington for permission to return home. It so depressed her that she even flirted with suicide, yet all the same, a correspondence did ensue between Marina and the Soviets in Washington.

She can read between the bureaucratic lines, however. Soviet officials, Marina can see, are not in a hurry to take her back. Processing her application, they indicate, will require half a year. Even by June 4, after several exchanges of letters over the months between, little has gone forward—here, for example, is a letter of June 4, 1963, from V. Gerasimov of the Consulate Section of the Soviet Embassy:

June 4, 1963

Dear Marina Nicolaevna,

In connection with your request for entrance to the Soviet Union for permanent residence, in our letter of April 18th we requested you if possible to come to Washington and visit the Consulate Section of our Embassy.

If it is difficult for you to visit us we request you to advise us by letter concerning reasons which made you request this permission . . .
¹

She made no rush to answer. A pot such as this could be kept simmering for years.

It is no small matter for Lee, however. If she hates his absorption in politics, he hates the mill-stone of his marriage. It is inhibiting to his political career. The attack on General Walker had been a species of shakedown cruise to test his capacities. Was he sufficiently ruthless to kill for political purposes? Since he had missed, the answer could only be a qualified yes. Moreover, he had had to withdraw altogether from Marina in the weeks preceding that attempt. It was as if his murderous impulses could only be gathered if he was without sexual release. To continue his marriage was to condemn himself, therefore, to a life of mediocrity, yet—there is no other explanation for so many of his actions—a sizable part of him adored Marina, and this quite apart from his full affection for June. For that matter, devotion to June was like an open display of his infatuation with himself. But Marina he loved as his woman, his difficult, caustic, contrary, and often wholly attractive wife—even if he could hardly tolerate her for most of the month. Are half of the young husbands in existence all that much unlike him? Or young wives?

Ruthlessness! He must have whipped himself with the thought that he lacked the cruelty to be a revolutionary, stern and disciplined. Now, in New Orleans, on May 23, the first book he takes out from the public library is
Portrait of a Revolutionary: Mao Tse Tung.
The author, Robert Payne, says of Mao, “He represented even in those days a new kind of man; one of those who single-handedly construct whole civilizations.”
²
If that was the noble role Mao had sculpted from history, how could Oswald not have decided—indeed, can we doubt it?—that it is not enough to be a leader; one has to fashion a new kind of existence.

First, however, is the little matter of playing an active role in history. If he had been a warlock, he would have consulted his runes, but he was, as he saw it, a twenty-three-year-old master of new revolutionary politics on the road to future glory—and the road went straight through Cuba. As Edward Epstein puts it, “Once he got to Havana, he could no doubt find contacts and connections with the Castro government. He even at one point bragged to Marina that he would become a ‘minister’ in the government.”
³
No, he would not have found it hard to believe that if he could get there and reach the ear of those who counted, he could become an intimate adviser on what was going on in the USSR. (Indeed, in retrospect, we can ask ourselves—it is a fair question—whether Castro’s advisers knew as much about Soviet reality as Oswald.)

Epstein:
The problem for Oswald was getting there. Since it was illegal at the time for a United States citizen to travel to Cuba, he would have to obtain his visa at a Cuban Embassy outside the country, and to do that, he would need some credentials to prove that he was a supporter of the Cuban government. His game in New Orleans involved creating just such a record for himself.
⁴

May 26

Dear Sirs,

I am requesting formal membership in your organization . . . .

Now that I live in New Orleans I have been thinking about renting a small office at my own expense for the purpose of forming a F.P.C.C. branch here in New Orleans. Could you give me a charter?

Also, I would like information on buying pamphlets, etc., in large lots, as well as blank F.P.C.C. applications, etc.

Also, a picture of Fidel, suitable for framing, would be a welcome touch.

Offices down here rent for $30 a month and if I had a steady flow of literature I would be glad to take the expense.

Of course I work and could not supervise the office at all times but I’m sure I could get some volunteers to do it.

Could you add some advice or recommendations?

I am not saying this project would be a roaring success
but I am willing to try
an office, literature, and getting people to know you. [You] are the fundamentals of the F.P.C.C. as far as I can see so here’s hoping to hear from you.

Yours respectfully,
Lee H. Oswald
⁵

Three days later, well before he could receive a reply, he went into the Jones Printing Company on Girod Street with an eight-by-ten sheet of paper on which he had written out the final draft of a handbill:

HANDS

OFF

CUBA!

Join the Fair Play for

Cuba Committee

New Orleans Charter

Member Branch

Free Literature, Lectures

Location:

Everyone Welcome!
⁶

Early in June, he would receive a letter from the National Director of FPCC, V. T. Lee, and would probably have seen it as considerably more than coincidence that the man’s last name was the same as his own first name. V. T. Lee was, however, cautionary, and advised Oswald not to take an office. The American public, if polled, would probably have come out 95 percent against Castro in that late spring of 1963, or at least 95 out of 100 people were not going to be caught saying anything positive about Fidel to a pollster. V. T. Lee’s letter gives a small hint of a siege mentality:

May 29, 1963

Lee H. Oswald

1907 Magazine Street

New Orleans, Louisiana

Dear Friend:

. . . Your interest in helping to form an FPCC Chapter in New Orleans is gratefully received. I shall try to give you . . . a better picture of what this entails [since we] know from experience it . . . requires some sacrifice on the part of those involved.

You must realize that you will come under tremendous pressures . . . and you will not be able to operate in the manner which is conventional here in the north-east. Even most of our big-city Chapters have been forced to abandon the idea of operating an office in public. The national office in New York is the only one in the country today . . . Most Chapters have discovered it is easier to operate semi-privately out of a home and maintain a P.O. Box for all mailings and public notices . . . . We do have a serious and often violent opposition and this [gives rise to] many unnecessary incidents which frighten away prospective supporters. I definitely would not recommend an office, at least not one that will be easily identifiable to the lunatic fringe in your community. Certainly, I would not recommend that you engage one in the very beginning but wait and see how you can operate in the community through several public experiences . . . [We] have learned a great deal over the last three years through some bitter experiences . . .

We hope to hear from you very soon in this regard and are looking forward to a good working relationship for the future. Please feel free to discuss this matter quite thoroughly with me.

Fraternally,
V. T. Lee
⁷

Oswald would follow none of this advice. His real purpose, after all, was not to create a functioning branch of the FPCC but to build as quickly as possible a record that would impress Castro’s officials. So, Oswald’s first need was to assemble a dossier of official FPCC letters, to which he could add such documents as handbills and, even more important, news clippings. He would have to select actions that would attract media attention. A first step would be to create other officials besides himself in the New Orleans chapter of the FPCC:

MR. RANKIN.
Were the words “A. J. Hidell, Chapter President” . . . in your handwriting?

MARINA OSWALD.
Yes . . . . Lee wrote this down on a piece of paper and told me to sign it on this card, and said that he would beat me if I didn’t . . . I said, “You have selected this name because it sounds like Fidel” and he blushed and said, “Shut up, it is none of your business.”

MR. RANKIN.
Was there any discussion about who Hidell, as signed on the bottom of that card, was?

MARINA OSWALD.
He said . . . there is no Hidell [and] I taunted him about this and . . . said how shameful it is that a person who has his own perfectly good name should take another name, and he said, “ . . . I have to do it this way, people will think I have big organization . . .”
⁸
After he became busy with his pro-Cuban activity, he received a letter from somebody in New York . . . from some Communist leader and he was very happy, he felt that this was a great man that he had received a letter from.

You see, when I would make fun of him, of his activity to some extent, he said that I didn’t understand him and here, you see, was proof that someone else did, that there were people who understood his activity.
⁹

From Marina’s narrative:
. . . To tell the truth, I sympathized with Cuba. I have a good opinion of this new Cuba, since when I was living in Russia I saw lots of excellent movies about the new life in Cuba [and] I came to think that the people were satisfied . . . and that the revolution had given to many work, land, and a better life than they had had before. When I came to the United States and people told me that they did not love Fidel Castro, I did not believe them . . . .

But I did not support Lee since I felt that he was too small a person to take so much on himself. He became conceited about doing such an important job and helping Cuba. But I saw that no one here agreed with him. So why do it? . . . Cuba will get along by itself, without Lee Oswald’s help. I thought it was better for him to take care of his family.
¹⁰

Of course, Marina’s grandmother used to tell her, “Politics is poop!” How Russian is such an attitude: My private life is my only wealth! She was in this sense the worst possible wife for Oswald.

McMillan:
She believed it was his family, June and herself, whom he loved in his heart, but that in accordance with his lofty ideas about himself, he . . . forced himself to put politics above everything. It seemed to her that Lee was not being true to himself. Marina longed to cry out to him: “Why do you torture us so? You know you don’t believe half of what you are saying.”
¹¹

We come back to his basic dilemma: To which half of himself will he be faithful—his need for love, or his need for power and fame? What is never taken seriously enough in Oswald is the force of his confidence that he has the makings of a great leader. If his living conditions are mean and his role is not viewed solemnly by anyone but himself, he can still fortify his belief in the future of Lee Harvey Oswald by contemplating those anonymous early years spent by Lenin and Hitler. So his ideas are at least as real to him as the family that he does indeed care for—in his fashion.

Public events, however, may have been tipping the balance. On June 11, Kennedy broadcast a nationwide speech that called for a new civil rights bill, and on that same night, Medgar Evers of the NAACP was fatally shot on the doorstep of his home in Jackson, Mississippi.

Jackson was but two hundred miles from New Orleans, and the air was boiling in the Deep South. Oswald may have seen it as his personal duty to face into such heat. On June 16, the day after Medgar Evers’ funeral, he went to the Dumaine Street wharf, where the USS
Wasp,
an aircraft carrier, was docked.

Oswald started passing out his newly acquired Fair Play for Cuba leaflets. Here is part of the text:

On January 16, 1961, the United States Government issued a ban on travel by U.S. citizens to Cuba. Failure to abide by the ban is punishable by a fine of $5,000 or 5 years in jail or both . . . .

What mysterious features exist on this tiny island of 6-½ million people to become so taboo for American eyes? Although the policy of the Castro government is to promote tourism everywhere in Cuba, our government innocently explains that the travel ban is to safeguard our welfare . . . .