Castro: 'Oswald Could Not Have Been the One Who Killed Kennedy'

Jeffrey Goldberg writes, after a visit with Fidel Castro:

Castro suspects that Oswald might not have been involved in the assassination at all. He told me -- to my great surprise -- over lunch three years ago in Havana: “I have reached the conclusion that Oswald could not have been the one who killed Kennedy.” Castro is of course a confident man, but he said this with a degree of surety that was noteworthy[...]

Self-preservation was on the Cuban leader's mind in the days after the assassination. He understood that he would be blamed for JFK’s death, especially after it was learned that Oswald had vociferously opposed American policy toward Castro’s Cuba. Castro tried hard to communicate to the Americans that he had nothing to do with JFK's death.

As Philip Shenon reports in his new book, "A Cruel and Shocking Act: The Secret History of the Kennedy Assassination," Castro even arranged to be interviewed by a Warren Commission staffer on a yacht off Cuba. “Immediately after the assassination, Castro very justifiably worried that he would be blamed, and he was worried that if he were blamed, there would be an American invasion of Cuba,” Shenon told me. But Castro’s denials were credible. Despite the many arguments advanced by conspiracy theorists, he said, “There is no credible evidence that Castro was involved personally in ordering the assassination.”[...]

Castro told us at lunch -- as he would -- that none of his associates or officials had anything to do with the assassination and that the Cuban embassy in Mexico City, which Oswald had visited, denied him permission to visit Cuba, fearing he was a provocateur.
I asked Castro why he thought Oswald could not have acted alone. He proceeded to tell the table a long and discursive story about an experiment he staged, after the assassination, to see if it were possible for a sniper to shoot Kennedy in the manner the assassination was alleged to have happened. “We had trained our people in the mountains during the war” -- the Cuban revolution -- “on these kind of telescopic sites. So we knew about this kind of shooting. We tried to recreate the circumstances of this shooting, but it wasn’t possible for one man to do. The news I had received is that one man killed Kennedy in his car with a rifle, but I deducted that this story was manufactured to fool people.”
Castro said his suspicions grew especially pronounced after Oswald was killed. “There was the story of Jack Ruby, who was said to be so moved by the death of Kennedy that he decided to shoot Oswald on his own. That was just unbelievable to us.”
I then asked Castro what he believed actually happened. I brought up his friend Oliver Stone, who suggested that it was the Central Intelligence Agency and a group of anti-Castro Cubans (I used the term “anti-you Cubans”) that plotted the assassination.
“Quite possibly,” he said. “This is quite possibly so. There were people in the American government who thought Kennedy was a traitor because he didn’t invade Cuba when he had the chance, when they were asking him. He was never forgiven for that.”
"So that’s what you think might have happened?"
“No doubt about it,” Castro answered.