Castro doubted single gunman in JFK slaying

Lots of retrospectives about Cuban President Fidel Castro are popping up in the Latin American media. The announcement this week of his resignation has prompted a wave of recollections and assessments of the iconic figure and his sometimes contradictory manifestations: the revolutionary-hero-turned-dictator, the pugnacious comandante who stood up to his superpower neighbor but constructed a police state at home, the visionary leader who provided universal healthcare and free education while imprisoning dissidents and suppressing free speech, the master planner who regularly blamed the now five-decade-long U.S. embargo for a chronically underperforming economy, the exporter of revolution who was left in the lurch when the Iron Curtain came down.

Castro was a central figure in the Cold War, an era when Latin America was a battleground of ideologies. One senses a whiff of nostalgia out there for those bad old days. The Argentine writer David Vinas writing in Clarin recalls a meeting that he and several other intellectuals (Mario Benedetti, Julio Cortazar) had with Castro in Old Havana. Conversation turned to the assassination of John F. Kennedy, an early Castro nemesis. Cuba, of course, figures in sundry conspiracy theories about Kennedy's slaying. It turns out Castro didn't buy Washington's official single-gunman theory. "There must have been at least two shooters,'' the ever analytical Castro told his guests, diagramming with his fingers a possible scenario. "It couldn't have been one man.''

-- Andres D'Alessandro in Buenos Aires and Patrick J. McDonnell in Lima

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