The National Archives and Records Administration posted more than 63,000 pages of files relating to President John F. Kennedy’s assassination on Tuesday night.
More than 63,000 pages of records related to the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy were released Tuesday, creating a possibility that new information could be revealed about Miami's possible ties to the event.
The U.S. National Archives and Records Administration posted to its website roughly 2,200 files containing the documents following an order by President Donald Trump.
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Kennedy was killed Nov. 22, 1963, on a visit to Dallas, when his motorcade was finishing its parade route downtown and shots rang out from the Texas School Book Depository building. Police arrested 24-year-old Lee Harvey Oswald, who had positioned himself from a sniper’s perch on the sixth floor. Two days later nightclub owner Jack Ruby fatally shot Oswald during a jail transfer.
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A year after the assassination, the Warren Commission, which President Lyndon B. Johnson established to investigate, concluded that Oswald acted alone and that there was no evidence of a conspiracy. But that didn’t quell a web of alternative theories over the decades.
Plot in Miami
Four days before the assassination, on Nov. 18, 1963, Kennedy visited Miami, where there were fears an attempt would be made on his life, so much so that his planned motorcade trip through Miami was cancelled.
The motorcade was cancelled after Miami Police received an audio recording in which a man said there were plans to "shoot him [Kennedy] from an office building, with a high-powered rifle."
Kennedy spoke at Miami International Airport, where he was met by a cheering crowd and delivered a brief campaign speech. He also visited the Americana Hotel in Bal Harbour to deliver another speech.
"I'm glad to come here today, I'm going to come back next year and make a longer speech but I want to express my thanks, I want to express my thanks to all of you," Kennedy said at MIA. "In 1960, which was not so long ago we carried this County by 65,000 votes or so this is a great Democratic County in a great Democratic area in a state which I'm convinced is going to be Democratic in 1964."
After just a matter of hours, Kennedy left Miami, on his way to Texas.
Cuba and JFK
There was already some anti-Kennedy sentiment in Miami, particularly among the Cuban exile community following the failed Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961.
The rise of Communist leader Fidel Castro in Cuba plagued Kennedy throughout his presidency.
Kennedy's White House had made several assassination attempts on Castro that were all unsuccessful, and Castro's alliance with the Soviet Union led to the Cuban Missile Crisis, the most daunting test of Kennedy during his time in office.
There's long been speculation that Castro had a hand in the JFK assassination, or at the very least that Cuban intelligence had links to Oswald.
Oswald traveled to Mexico City and visited Cuban and Soviet Union embassies two months before the assassination and may have met with Cuban intelligence officers while there, according to Brian Latell a former CIA officer who wrote "Castro's Secrets: Cuban Intelligence, The CIA, and the Assassination of John F. Kennedy."
"There's a substantial amount of evidence that points to a Cuban culpability in Kennedy's death," Latell told NBC6 in 2017. "Maybe even to the extent of inspiring, motivating him, setting him into motion with the idea of assassinating Kennedy."
Cuba Mentioned in New Files
One CIA memo describes how Oswald phoned the Soviet Embassy while in Mexico City to ask for a visa to visit the Soviet Union. He also visited the Cuban Embassy, apparently interested in a travel visa that would permit him to visit Cuba and wait there for a Soviet visa. On Oct. 3, more than a month before the assassination, he drove back into the United States through a crossing point at the Texas border.
Another memo mentions a discussion with a man who said he witnessed a 1969 meeting in which Castro spoke for two hours about how one assassin couldn't have killed Kennedy.
The man said Castro ordered a reenactment of the assassination using his bestmarksmen and they couldn't duplicate what Oswald did.
Patience With New Files
The U.S. National Archives and Records Administration posted to its website roughly 2,200 files containing the documents. The vast majority of the National Archives' collection of over 6 million pages of records, photographs, motion pictures, sound recordings and artifacts related to the assassination have previously been released.
Larry J. Sabato, director of the University of Virginia Center for Politics and author of “The Kennedy Half-Century,” said it will take time to fully review the records.
“We have a lot of work to do for a long time to come, and people just have to accept that,” he said.
