“John and Robert Kennedy knew what they were doing. They waged a vicious war against Fidel Castro—a war someone had to lose.”   

And the loser turned out to be John F. Kennedy.

So writes investigative reporter Gus Russo in Live By the Sword: The Secret War Against Castro and the Death of JFK, published in 1998.

In what is may be the definitive account of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, Russo reaches some startling—but highly documented—conclusions:

• Lee Harvey Oswald assassinated Kennedy.
• He did it alone.
• Oswald, a former Marine, was a committed Marxist—whose hero was Castro.
• The CIA’s ongoing campaign to overthrow and/or assassinate Castro was an open secret throughout the Gulf.
• Oswald visited New Orleans in the spring of 1963.
• There he learned that Castro was in the crosshairs of the CIA.
• For this, he blamed John F. Kennedy.
• Oswald told his Russian-born wife, Marina: “Fidel Castro needs defenders. I’m going to join his army of volunteers.”
• Jack Ruby, a Dallas nightclub owner, murdered Oswald because he was distraught over Kennedy’s death.
• Ruby was not part of a Mafia conspiracy to silence Oswald.
• Skeptics of the Warren Commission—which concluded that Oswald had acted alone—asked the wrong question: “Who killed Kennedy?”
• They should have asked: “Why was he killed?”
• The answer—according to Russo: “The Kennedys’ relentless pursuit of Castro and Cuba backfired in tragedy on that terrible day in November, 1963.”

Another book well worth reading about America’s Cuban obsession during the early 1960s is American Tabloid, by James Ellroy.

Although a novel, it vividly captures the intrigue, danger and sleaziness that permeated that era as no dry, historical documents can.

“The 50’s are finished,” reads its paperback dust jacket. “Zealous young lawyer Robert Kennedy has a red-hot jones to nail Jimmy Hoffa. JFK has his eyes on the Oval Office.

“J. Edgar Hoover is swooping down on the Red Menace. Howard Hughes is dodging subpoenas and digging up Kennedy dirt. And Castro is mopping up the bloody aftermath of his new Communist nation….

“Mob bosses, politicos, snitches, psychos, fall guys and femmes fatale. They’re mixing up a Molotov cocktail guaranteed to end the country’s innocence with a bang.”

Among the legacies of America’s twisted romance with anti-Castro Cubans:

• Following the JFK assassination, there was a cover-up.
• Its purpose: To protect the reputation of the United States Government—and that of its newly-martyred President.
• The CIA and FBI concealed the CIA-Mafia assassination plots from the Warren Commission assigned to investigate Kennedy’s murder.
• Other government officials participating in the cover-up included Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy and President Lyndon B. Johnson.
• Ironically, this secrecy ignited the widespread—and false—belief that the President had died at the hands of a government conspiracy.
• Robert Kennedy feared that his relentless pursuit of Castro might have led Castro to “take out” JFK first.
• Fearing his own assassination if he continued Kennedy’s efforts to murder Castro, President Johnson ordered the CIA to halt its campaign to overthrow and/or assassinate the Cuban leader.
• The huge Cuban community throughout Florida—and especially Miami—continues to exert a blackmailing influence on American politics.
• Right-wing politicians from Richard Nixon to Donald Trump have reaped electoral rewards by catering to the demands of this hate-obsessed voting block.
• These Cuban expatriate hope that the United States will launch a full-scale military invasion of the island to remove Fidel’s surviving brother, Raul. 
• Having grown rich and soft in the United States, they fear to risk their own lives by returning to Cuba to overthrow the Castro regime—as Fidel had overthrown Fulgencio Batista.
• Only President Barack Obama had the political courage to re-establish diplomatic relations with Cuba—in 2015.
• This occurred long after the United States had reestablished ties with such former enemies as the Soviet Union, China and Vietnam.  
• On June 4, 2019, President Donald Trump once again banned educational and recreational travel to Cuba.

The Cuban Missile Crisis remains the single most dangerous moment of the 50-year Cold War, when the world stood only minutes away from nuclear Armageddon.

That crisis stemmed from the American Right’s twisted obsession with Cuba.

So what are the lessons to be learned from that obsession?

• It is long past time to demand major changes in our foreign policy toward Cuba.
• It’s time to end the half-century contamination of American politics by those Cubans who live only for their hatred of Castro—and those political candidates who live to exploit it. 
• (For example: Marco Rubio got elected U.S. Senator from Florida in 2010 by claiming that his parents had been forced to leave Cuba in 1959, after Fidel Castro took power. In fact, they had left Cuba in 1956—during the Batista dictatorship.)
• It’s time to end this wag-the-dog relationship. A population of about 1,700,000 Cuban exiles living in Florida should not be allowed to shape the domestic and foreign policy of a nation of 300 million.
• Those who continue to hate—or love—Fidel Castro should be left to their own private feud. But that is a feud they should settle on their own island, and not from the shores of the United States.

On October 22, 1962, President John F. Kennedy went on nationwide TV to announce that Russian nuclear missiles had been installed in Cuba—and his blockade of that island.   

He warned that any nuclear missile launched from Cuba against any nation would be regarded as an attack on the United States by the Soviet Union—and would trigger “a full retaliatory response” upon the U.S.S.R. 

President John F. Kennedy addresses the nation

And he demanded that the Soviets remove all of their offensive weapons from Cuba:

“The path we have chosen for the present is full of hazards, as all paths are, but it is the one most consistent with our character and courage as a nation and our commitments around the world.

“The cost of freedom is always high, but Americans have always paid it. And one path we shall never choose, and that is the path of surrender or submission.”

On October 26,  the United States raised the readiness level of SAC forces to DEFCON 2—the step just short of war. For the only time in U.S. history, B-52 bombers were dispersed to various locations and made ready to take off, fully equipped, on 15 minutes’ notice.

Other measures taken included:

• One-eighth of America’s 1,436 bombers were on airborne alert.
• About 145 intercontinental ballistic missiles stood on ready alert.
• Air Defense Command redeployed 161 nuclear-armed interceptors to 16 dispersal fields within nine hours with one-third maintaining 15-minute alert status.
• Twenty-three nuclear-armed B-52s were sent to orbit points within striking distance of the Soviet Union.

An invasion date of Cuba was set for October 29. But the Kennedy Administration—and the American military—didn’t know that Russian soldiers guarding the missiles had been armed with tactical nuclear weapons.

Had the Marines gone in, those mini-nukes would have been used. And a fullscale nuclear exchange between the United States and the Soviet Union would have almost certainly followed.

At the height of the crisis, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy offered a solution.

Khrushchev had sent two teletypes to Kennedy. The first had agreed to remove the missiles, but the second had demanded that the United States remove its own nuclear missiles from Turkey, which bordered the Soviet Union.

Robert Kennedy’s solution: Ignore the second message—and announce that President Kennedy had accepted Khrushchev’s offer to remove the missiles.

After this announcement was made, President Kennedy said: “It can go either way now.”

John F. Kennedy in the Oval Office

The crisis ended on October 28. Under enormous pressure, Khrushchev agreed to remove the missiles from Cuba.

Behind his decision lay a secret promise by the Kennedy administration to remove its obsolete nuclear missiles from Turkey, which bordered the Soviet Union. And a public pledge to not invade Cuba.

On the night the crisis ended, there occurred a prophetic exchange between the two Kennedy brothers.

JFK: “Maybe this is the night I should go to the theater”—a reference to Abraham Lincoln’s fatal attendance of Ford’s Theater at the end of the Civil War.

RFK: “If you go, I want to go with you.”

John F. and Robert F. Kennedy

But the Kennedys continued their campaign of sabotage throughout Cuba. And they were preparing something far bigger: A fullscale American invasion of the island.

On October 4, 1963, the Joint Chiefs of Staff submitted its latest version of the invasion plan, known as OPLAN 380-63.  Its timetable went:

• January, 1964:  Infiltration into Cuba by Cuban exiles.
• July 15, 1964:  U.S. conventional forces join the fray.
• August 3, 1964:  All-out U.S. air strikes on Cuba.
• October 1, 1964:  Full-scale invasion to install “a government friendly to the U.S.”

During the Cuban Missile Crisis, Robert Kennedy—referring to the 1941 Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor—had resisted demands for a “sneak attack” on Cuba by saying: “I don’t want my brother to be the Tojo of the 1960s.”

Now the Kennedys planned such an attack on Cuba just one month before the November, 1964 Presidential election.

Then fate—in the unlikely figure of Lee Harvey Oswald—intervened.

On November 22, 1963, while the President rode through Dallas in an open-air automobile, a rifle-wielding assassin opened fire. He scored two hits on Kennedy—in the back of the neck and head. The second wound proved instantly fatal.

The nation and the world were shocked—and plunged into deep mourning.

But for some of those who had waged a secret, lethal war against Fidel Castro for the previous two years, Kennedy’s death—at least in retrospect—didn’t come as a surprise.

Robert Kennedy, in particular, spent the remaining years of his life agonizing over the possibility that his highly personal war against Castro had backfired. 

That Castro, fed up with the CIA’s assassination plots against him, had retaliated with one of his own.

Robert Kennedy’s fears and guilt were compounded by the fact that, while waging war on Castro, he had waged an equally ruthless crusade against organized crime.

He knew that some of the mobsters he had tried to send to prison had played a major role in the CIA’s efforts to “hit” Castro. Had the Mafia—believing itself the victim of a double-cross—put out a “contract” on JFK instead?   

It was a question that haunted him until the day he died.