Oswald's Tale: An American Mystery

by Norman Mailer

  STUCKEY: Tonight we have with us a representative of probably the most controversial organization connected with Cuba in this country. The organization is the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. The person, Lee Oswald, secretary of the New Orleans Chapter for the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. This organization has long been on the Justice Department’s blacklist and is a group generally considered to be the leading pro-Castro body in the nation. As a reporter of Latin American affairs in this city for several years now, your columnist has kept a lookout for representatives of this pro-Castro group. None appeared in public view until this week, when young Lee Oswald was arrested and convicted for disturbing the peace. He was arrested passing out pro-Castro literature to a crowd which included several violently anti-Castro Cuban refugees. When we finally tracked Mr. Oswald down today and asked him to participate in “Latin Listening Post,” he told us frankly that he would because it may help his organization to attract more members in this area . . . And knowing that Mr. Oswald must have had to demonstrate a great skill in dialectics before he was entrusted with his present post, we now proceed on the course of random questioning of Mr. Oswald.4

  With such an introduction, how could Oswald not be near to heaven? He is, however, no longer in the world of manners but in the media. His host moves quickly to the attack:

  STUCKEY: Mr. Oswald, there are many commentators in the journalistic field in this country that equate the Fair Play for Cuba Committee with the American Communist Party. What is your feeling about this and are you a member of the American Communist Party?

  OSWALD: Well, the Fair Play for Cuba Committee with its headquarters at 799 Broadway in New York has been investigated by the Senate sub-committees who are occupied with this sort of thing. They have investigated our organization from the viewpoint of taxes, subversion, allegiance and in general, where and how and why we exist. They have found absolutely nothing to connect us with the Communist Party of the United States. In regards to your question as to whether I myself am a Communist, as I said, I do not belong to any other organization . . . .

  STUCKEY: Does your group believe that the Castro regime is not actually a front for a Soviet colony in the Western Hemisphere?

  OSWALD: Very definitely. Castro is an independent leader of an independent country. He has ties with the Soviet Union . . . That does not mean, however, that he is dependent on Russia. He receives trade from many countries, including Great Britain to a certain extent, France, certain other powers in the Western Hemisphere. He is even trading with several of the more independent African states, so that you cannot point at Castro and say that he is a Russian puppet . . . . I believe that was pointed out very well during the October crisis, when Castro definitely said that although Premier Khrushchev had urged him to have on-site inspection of his rocket bases in Cuba, that Fidel Castro refused.

  STUCKEY: Do you feel that the Fair Play for Cuba Committee would maintain its present line as far as supporting Premier Castro if the Soviet Union broke relations with the Castro regime in Cuba?

  OSWALD: We do not support the man. We do not support the individual. We support the idea of an independent revolution in the Western Hemisphere, free from American intervention . . . . If the Cuban people destroy Castro, or if he is otherwise proven to have betrayed his own revolution, that will not have any bearing upon this committee . . . .

  STUCKEY: Do you believe that the Castro regime is a Communist regime?

  OSWALD: They have said . . . that they are a Marxist country. On the other hand, so is Ghana, so is several other countries in Africa. Every country which emerges from a sort of feudal state, as Cuba did, experiments, usually, in socialism, in Marxism. For that matter, Great Britain has socialized medicine. You cannot say that Castro is a Communist at this time, because he has not developed his country, his system, this far. He has not had the chance to become a Communist. He is an experimenter, a person who is trying to find the best way for his country. If he chooses a socialist or a Marxist or a Communist way of life, that is something upon which only the Cuban people can pass. We do not have the right to pass on that . . . .

  STUCKEY: Mr. Oswald, does it make any difference to you if any of the activities of the local branch of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee benefit the Communist Party or the goals of international Communism?

  OSWALD: Well, that is what I believe you would term a loaded question. However, I will attempt to answer it. It is inconsistent with my ideals to support Communism, my personal ideals. It is inconsistent with the ideals of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee to support ideals of international Communism. We are not occupied with that problem. We are occupied with the problem of Cuba. We do not believe under any circumstances that in supporting our ideals about Cuba, our pro-Castro ideals, we do not believe that is inconsistent with believing in democracy. Quite the contrary . . . .5

  They began to speak of other countries in Latin America. Oswald remarked: “Who will be able to find any official or any person who knows about Latin America who will say that Nicaragua does not have a dictatorship?” They had come to the crux of the discussion. Stuckey may have thought that Oswald was now in trouble:

  STUCKEY: Very interesting. [We] have heard about these dictatorships for many, many years, but it is curious to me why no Nicaraguans fled to the United States last year, whereas we had possibly 50,000 to 60,000 Cubans fleeing from Cuba to the United States. What is the Fair Play for Cuba Committee’s official reply to this?

  OSWALD: Well, a good question. Nicaragua’s situation is considerably different from Castro’s Cuba. People are inclined not to flee their countries unless some new system, new factor, enters into their lives. I must say that very surely no new factors have entered into Nicaragua for about 300 years, in fact, the people live exactly as they have always lived in Nicaragua. I am referring to the overwhelming majority of the people in Nicaragua, which is a feudal dictatorship with 90 percent of the people engaged in agriculture. These peasants are uneducated. They have one of the lowest living standards in all of the Western Hemisphere [so] no new factor, no liberating factor has entered into their lives, they remain in Nicaragua. Now the people who have fled Cuba, that is the interesting situation. Needless to say, there are classes of criminals; there are classes of people who are wanted in Cuba for crimes against humanity and most of those people are the same people who are in New Orleans and have set themselves up in stores with blood money and who engage in day to day trade with New Orleanians. Those are the people who would certainly not want to go back to Cuba and who would certainly want to flee Cuba. There are other classes. There are peasants who do not like the collectivization in Cuban agriculture. There are others who have one reason or another . . . for fleeing Cuba. Most of these people . . . are allowed to leave after requesting the Cuban government for exit visas. Some of these people for some reasons or another do not like to apply for these visas or they feel they cannot get them; they flee, they flee Cuba in boats, they flee any way they can go, and I think that the opinion and the attitude of the Cuban government to this is good riddance.

  STUCKEY: Mr. Oswald, this is very interesting because as a reporter in the field for some time I have been interviewing refugees now for about three years and I’d say that the last Batista man, officially, that I talked to left Cuba about two and a half years ago and the rest of them that I’ve talked to have been taxicab drivers, laborers, cane cutters, and that sort of thing. I thought this revolution was supposed to benefit these people . . .

  OSWALD: . . . You know, it’s very funny about revolutions. Revolutions require work, revolutions require sacrifice, [and] people who have fled Cuba have not been able to adapt themselves to the new factors which have entered these peoples’ lives. These people are the uneducated. These people are the people who do not remain in Cuba to be educated by young people, who are afraid of the alphabet, who are afraid of these new things which are occurring, who are afraid that they would lose something by collectivization. They are afraid that they would lose somet
hing by seeing their sugar crops taken away and in place of sugar crops, some other vegetable, some other product, planted, because Cuba has always been a one-product country, more or less. These are the people who have not been able to adapt.

  STUCKEY: Mr. Oswald, you say their sugar crops. Most of the Cubans I have talked to that have had anything to do with agriculture in the last year and a half have not owned one single acre of ground, they were cane cutters.6

  If Stuckey has made a telling point, it will hardly stop Oswald. Potentially, he has debater’s reflexes worthy of Richard Nixon—he treads water for the duration of three sentences, gathers his reply, and proceeds to give it:

  OSWALD: That is correct and they are the ones who are fleeing the Castro regime. That is correct, sir. That is very, very true and I am very glad you brought that point up. You know, it used to be that these people worked for the United Fruit Company or American companies engaged in sugar refining, oil refining in Cuba. They worked a few months every year during the cane cutting or sugar refining season. They never owned anything, and they feel now that . . . the right to work for five months a year has been taken away from them. They feel that now they have to work all year round to plant new crops, to make a new economy, and so they feel that they have been robbed, . . . of the right to do as they please . . . What they do not realize is that they have been robbed of the right to be exploited, robbed of the right to be cheated, robbed of the right of New Orleanian companies to take away what was rightfully theirs. Of course, they have to share now. Everybody gets an equal portion. This is collectivization and this is very hard on some people, on people preferring the dog-eat-dog economy.7

  MR. JENNER . . . . you supplied the FBI with [a radio] transcript?

  MR. STUCKEY. No, as a matter of fact I gave the tape to the FBI the Monday following the interview, which would have been August 20, 1963. I told them I thought it was very interesting, and if they would like to have a transcript they could copy it, which they did. They made a copy and then they gave me a copy of their transcript and returned the tape to me . . . .

  MR. JENNER . . . . would you tell us about that broadcast?

  MR. STUCKEY. Yes.

  As I said, this was a 37-minute rambling interview between Oswald and myself and following the interview, first we played it back to hear it. He was satisfied . . . I think he thought he had scored quite a coup.

  Then I went back over it in his presence and with an engineer’s help excerpted a couple . . . of his comments in which he said Castro was a free and independent leader of a free and independent state, and the rest of it, as I recall, was largely my summarizing of the other principal points of the 37-minute interview, and it was broadcast on schedule that night.

  MR. JENNER. You had watered it down in length to how many minutes?

  MR. STUCKEY. Five minutes.

  MR. JENNER. Five minutes?

  MR. STUCKEY. Actually 4 and a half.

  MR. JENNER . . . . Was that your last contact with Mr. Oswald?

  MR. STUCKEY. No, it was not . . . . I told him that I was going to talk to the news director to see if [he] was interested in running the entire 37-minute tape later, [but] the news director [said] there would be more public interest if we did not run this tape at all but instead arranged a second program, a debate panel show, with some local anti-Communists on there to refute some of his arguments . . .

  I picked Mr. Edward S. Butler [who] is the Executive Director of the Information Council of the Americas in New Orleans . . . an anti-Communist propaganda organization. Their principal activity is to [distribute] strongly anti-Communist . . . tapes to radio stations throughout Latin America . . .

  MR. JENNER. [Mr. Butler] was an articulate and knowledgeable man in this area to which he directs his attention?

  MR. STUCKEY. Yes; so I asked him to be one of the panelists on the show, which he accepted, and incidentally, I let him hear the 37-minute tape in advance; and for the other panelist, I asked Mr. Carlos Bringuier [in order] to give it a little Cuban flavor.

  And then Oswald called me . . . and I told him we were going to arrange the show and would he be interested, and he said, yes, indeed, and then he said, “How many of you am I going to have to fight?” That was his version of saying how many are on the panel.

  MR. JENNER. He said this to you?

  MR. STUCKEY. Yes; in a jocular way . . . He said he thought that would be interesting.8

  Lee is ready to believe that he may just be as good as he has been telling himself he is ever since he started dominating political discussions in the Marine Corps.

  Of course, his estimate of the power of the machine he opposes is not nearly so keen as his recognition of his own capacities when he is at his best.

  McMillan: While he was talking to an FBI source over the telephone that day, Stuckey, as he remembers it, was put through to the chief or deputy chief of the New Orleans bureau, and this man read aloud to him over the phone portions of Oswald’s FBI file, including the facts that he had been to Russia, tried to renounce his U.S. citizenship, stayed there nearly three years, and married a Russian woman. Stuckey went to the FBI office and was permitted to examine the file, as well as newspaper clippings from Moscow at the time of Oswald’s defection.9

  MR. JENNER. And was he unaware when he came in at 5:30 on the afternoon of Wednesday that you had done this, and received this information and had done some research?

  MR. STUCKEY. He was unaware of that fact. During the day . . . Mr. Butler called and said he too had found out the same thing . . . his source apparently was the House Un-American Activities Committee [and] we agreed together to produce this information on the program that night.

  MR. JENNER . . . . You thought it might be a bombshell and be unaware to him?

  MR. STUCKEY. Exactly.

  MR. JENNER. All right.

  MR. STUCKEY . . . . So at about 5:30 that afternoon I arrived at the studio alone. Oswald appeared, and in a very heavy gray flannel suit, and this is August in New Orleans, it is extremely hot, but he appears in [this] very bulky, badly cut suit, and looking very hot and uncomfortable. He had a blue shirt on and a dark tie, and a black looseleaf notebook . . . then Mr. Butler came in with Mr. Bringuier. Both looked as if they had pounds and pounds of literature with them, and statistics . . .

  MR. JENNER. Had Oswald met Mr. Butler before?

  MR. STUCKEY . . . . I think he knew who he was. Oswald asked me something about the organization, and I told him, I said, “Well, it is just like your organization; it is a propaganda outfit, just on the other side of the fence,” and that satisfied his curiosity.

  I think he immediately kissed it off as a hopeless rightist organization . . . 10

  Carlos Bringuier and Oswald had a conversation before the show began:

  MR. BRINGUIER . . . . I was . . . .trying to be as friendly to him as I could. I really believe that the best thing I could do is get one Communist out of the Communist Party and put him to work against communism, because [then] he know what communism mean, and I told to Oswald that I don’t have nothing against him in the personal way, just the ideologic way. I told him that for me it was impossible to see one American being a communist, because communism is trying to destroy the United States, and that if any moment . . . he will start to think that he can do something good for his country, for his family, and for himself, he could come to me, because I would receive him, because I repeat to him that I didn’t have nothing against him in the personal way. He smiled to me. He told me—he answered me that he was in the right side, the correct side, and that I was in the wrong side, and that he was doing his best. That were his words at that moment.

  Before we went inside the room of the debate, he saw my guidebook for Marines that I was carrying with me, because I did not know what will happen in the debate and I will have to have that weapon with me to destroy him personally as a traitor if he is doing something wrong in the debate. When he saw the guidebook for Marines, he smiled to me, and he told me, “We
ll, listen, Carlos, don’t try to do an invasion with that guidebook for Marines, because that is an old one and that will be a failure.” That was his joke in that moment . . .”11

  They began—Oswald against Bringuier and Butler and Stuckey and a moderator named Slatter. After the introductions, no time was wasted:

  BILL STUCKEY: . . . Mr. Butler brought some newspaper clippings to my attention . . . that Mr. Oswald had attempted to renounce his American citizenship in 1959 and become a Soviet citizen. There was another clipping dated 1962 saying that Mr. Oswald had returned from the Soviet Union with his wife and child after having lived there three years. Mr. Oswald, are these correct?

  OSWALD: That is correct. Correct, yeah.

  BILL STUCKEY: You did live in Russia for three years?

  OSWALD: That is correct, and I think that the fact that I did live for a time in the Soviet Union gives me excellent qualifications to repudiate charges that Cuba and the Fair Play for Cuba Committee is communist-controlled.

  SLATTER: Mr. Oswald, [is it correct] that you at one time asked to renounce your American citizenship and become a Soviet citizen . . . ?

  OSWALD: Well, I don’t think that has particular import to this discussion. We are discussing Cuban-American relations.

  SLATTER: Well, I think it has a bearing to this extent, Mr. Oswald: You say apparently that Cuba is not dominated by Russia and yet you apparently, by your own past actions, have shown that you have an affinity for Russia and perhaps communism, although I don’t know that you admit that you either are a communist or have been, could you straighten out that part? Are you or have you been a communist?