All logical, logistical or any otheral objections aside ; that’s a really bad argument. Secret services the world over employ a lot, and I mean a lot of complete muppets. I know Hollywood and the media like to portray the CIA, the Mossad, the KGB and what have you as all-professional elite warfighter high-speed operators who wear sunglasses at night, but in reality they’re just like any organization: they do with what they’ve got, and their mid-to-high level management couldn’t find their own asses with a GPS.
I mean, don’t you remember that embarrassing news item about MI6 operatives losing a couple of laptops full of sensitive intelligence in fucking taxicabs ? And remember: those were trained, loyal spies. Not turncoats or operatives of convenience or what have you.
Switch sides for a second: from the Cuban point of view*, what would there have been to lose ? Best case: Oswald shoots Kennedy, mission accomplished. Worst case: Oswald fucks up because he’s a complete tool, oh well. Deniable, he was a warlock assassin from the Vatican anyway, WINNING !
(Once again clarifying: I’m not saying any of this was what happened. I’m just saying that the fact that Lee was a nut, despite being somewhat certain a fact, does not automatically invalidate further outside involvement)
and assuming Cuba had anything at all to gain by shooting Kennedy. Roll with it. Don’t fight the hypothetical. Batteries not included.
Worst case: Oswald fucks up and reveals the Cubans put him up to it. Kennedy gets pissed and starts WWIII.
There’s a reason why Cuba would want to keep their involvement secret, and using Oswald, who was a nut job, Marxist, one time defector doesn’t really fit the profile of either an operative or patsy they would employ.
But you know what the trouble with JFK CT is now? So many CTs have been posed, and then debunked, that if a real conspiracy was uncovered, no rational person would be inclined to believe it. In this situation, even an ordinary claim requires extraordinary evidence.
FYI, the end of this interesting article on UVB-76 mentions that the author, Peter Savodnik, is writing a book (a novel? a history?) about Oswald’s time in the USSR. Might be worth keeping an eye out.
I was shocked a few months ago to learn just how young Oswald was when he died - only 24!!
If I had it in me to write a short story, I’d try to do something of a alternate history/character sketch of Oswald today in his seventies. Maybe a broken and bitter old man thinking about how he could have been something great; or alternately something portraying him as serene and with a modicum of humility and wisdom, thinking about how he lived through and learned from a bad period in his life. But in either case thinking back to one afternoon in late fall of 1963 and wondering what might have happened if his shift at the warehouse hadn’t been changed at the last minute. Or something like that.
We weren’t discussing intelligence agencies. We were discussing an imaginary group of Cubans who were angry and looking for revenge on JFK. I said that group, you wouldn’t pick Oswald because he was unreliable and unstable. I admit that can apply to any other group who might’ve hired the guy in a conspiracy theory.
You got sent to the gulag to meet quotas, you didn’t even need to be a pain in the ass. They probably wouldn’t have wanted to send a foreigner, though, might have attracted attention.
Being crazy doesn’t keep you out of the CIA, especially back in the days when they were doing experiments on remote viewing and LSD. Oswald’s own landlady’s mother was an associate of Andrija Puharich, like I say.
Of course, the CIA sometimes hired professional killers, which Oswald wasn’t (Marines don’t count). Paying Trafficante to take out Castro, for example.
There was a multi-part episode of Quantum Leap. Doesn’t seem like enough, somehow.
Actually, by the 1960’s the USSR had backed way off from mass gulag abuse. While still keeping them open and still banishing general political prisoners, they were no longer the nightmares of the Red Terror days. You had to attract some special attention to merit such a fate, and simply being a nuisance wasn’t normally a problem anymore.
It was a HUGE cock-tease, as well as a blatant insult to Clint Hill.
It did, however, ultimately make the point that Oswald was a lone nut, though the repeated use of the word “conspiracy” in the promotion for the episode suggested otherwise.