Castro was hailed when he visited America four months after he came to power. He was received by the secretary of state and acclaimed as a hero in a huge rally at Harvard University. Castro had not yet embraced Communism. As for Oswald, he told Delgado that he mistrusted both the Communist and the American forms of government. He thought that Castro was the pioneer who would show the way. He was what a revolutionary hero ought to be.
That spring Oswald and Delgado talked about going to Cuba. They and the other men in the barracks had heard of an army enlisted man named Morgan who became a legend because he quit the US Army with a dishonorable discharge, fought under Castro in the Escambres, and came out a Cuban Army major. Oswald and Delgado thought they would have a head start. They would have honorable discharges, and between Delgado’s knowledge of Spanish and Oswald’s ideas about government, which seemed to fit with those of Castro, things might go well for them in Cuba. The idea of becoming an officer had great appeal for them both.
“We could go over there and become officers and lead an expedition to some of these other islands and free them, too,” Delgado explained long afterward.[2] One of the ideas they had was to “do away with Trujillo” and free the Dominican people.
But Delgado was only talking—Oswald meant what he said. Very soon he was “making plans.” He peppered Delgado with questions about how they could get to Cuba and become part of the revolutionary movement. On Delgado’s advice Oswald bought a Spanish-English dictionary and started studying Spanish. Delgado also suggested that Oswald contact the Cuban Embassy, he assured him there was nothing subversive about it because the United States was on friendly terms with Cuba. And there is evidence that Oswald actually did contact the Cuban consulate in Los Angeles in hopes of getting into Cuba.[3] But when the men in the barracks discussed where they would seek refuge if ever they were in trouble at home, Oswald never hesitated: Russia would be his place of refuge.[4]
As the months went by and Castro started arresting political opponents, Delgado cooled off on Cuba. Not Oswald. He held stubbornly to his faith, claiming that Castro was getting a bad press and that “in all new governments, some errors have to occur.” Delgado had the impression that the rumors of arrests and executions were, if anything, making Oswald “more reverent” toward Castro.[5]
Oswald did not go to Cuba, but to the Soviet Union instead. Once he was disappointed there, Cuba seemed all the more like a truly revolutionary country, like Russia before it went wrong, before bureaucratic ossification set in. In his eyes Castro was still what a revolutionary hero ought to be. Besides, Cuba was small, beleaguered, an underdog. With all these things Oswald was in sympathy.
Once again he had come full circle. Four years earlier he had thought about gaining Castro’s trust and joining his revolution. Now, in the summer of 1963, he was thinking about the same thing. His effort to establish a chapter of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee in New Orleans appears to have been two-pronged, both an attempt to change American policy toward Cuba by peaceful political action at the grassroots level and an attempt to win the trust of the Castro government.
Lee Oswald needed a social system to idealize, and that for the moment was Cuba. He also needed a hero with whom he could identify; that hero was Fidel Castro.
The pseudonym a man uses, his alias, tells a good deal about him and whom he would like to be. Lee Oswald’s alias, the only one he ever used consistently, was Alik James Hidell. “Alik” was, of course, the name Oswald’s fellow workers had given him in Minsk. “Alik” was Oswald himself at a period in his life when he liked himself better than usual.
There is no “James” who is known to have meant anything to Oswald in real life. But the name may have been taken from James Bond, the fictional hero created by Ian Fleming, whose novels Oswald read with enjoyment. Bond is a spy, as Oswald often said he would like to be, and he had the altogether miraculous quality of extricating himself from every danger. James Bond was, indeed, at the center of a magic circle of invulnerability, just as Lee supposed himself to be, especially after his attempt on General Walker and his own miraculous escape.
“Hidell” is, however, the most suggestive part of the alias. As often happens, the idea for the name probably came to Oswald from several sources. In Atsugi, Japan, he had known a fellow Marine who hailed, as he did, from New Orleans, and whose name was John Rene Heindell, nicknamed “Hidell.”[6] But his reasons for choosing the name lie much deeper. Since the purpose of an alias is to hide one’s identity, the name “Hidell,” pronounced with a long “i,” has an exquisite economy, defining its use, “hide,” to perfection. But if the “i” is pronounced as a long “e,” the name becomes “Heedell,” a simple rhyme of Fidel. It was Marina who first spotted the similarity, for in Russian the letter “i” is pronounced as a long “e,” and in the Russian alphabet the consonant “kh” or “h,” as in “Hidell” comes immediately after “ph” or “f,” as in “Fidel.”
The beauty of “Alik James Hidell,” then, is that it held within it Oswald’s Russian name, “Alik,” linked it with the magical properties of James Bond, and made Oswald one with his hero, Fidel.
Lee used both his own name and his alias on his leaflets and handbills. He bought two boxes of metal letters and put them together to form stamps. When Marina first saw him making the stamps, she scornfully called it his “jewelry work.” On some of the leaflets he stamped: “L. H. Oswald, 4907 Magazine Street,” and on others: “A. J. Hidell, P. O. Box 30016.”[7] At first he was reluctant to let Marina see what he was doing, but one day, the second or third week in June, he proposed a trip to the zoo, then backed out of it, and Marina went alone with the baby. Returning sooner than he expected, they found him in the living room with handbills—Marina calls them “papers”—spread out all over the coffee table. Taken by surprise, Lee hesitated guiltily, then started to put his “papers” away. Marina asked why he was hiding them.
Lee put on a special, wheedling voice, a mixture of pleading and baby talk. “Do you like Cuba?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“Do you like Uncle Fidel?”
“Yes.”
“Well, these papers will help make people be on the side of Cuba. Do you want them attacking little Cuba?”
“No,” Marina said, “and you don’t have to hide them from me, either. Sit there and play your childish games.”
He put his handbills away and spent the rest of the day playing with June, doing housework, and making up to his wife in every way he could.
They spent a lot of evenings after that with Marina sitting in the rocking chair and Lee, seated at the coffee table, stamping leaflets. Marina was not happy to see him busy with “politics” again, but she told herself that as long as it had to do with papers and not a gun, she need not worry too much. It got so she hardly noticed.
Besides, Marina was preoccupied by troubles of her own, especially her fear that Lee would force her to go back to Russia. Night after night she sat rocking June to sleep with tears cascading down her cheeks.
Sometimes Lee pretended not to notice. Sometimes the sight of her tears actually put him in good spirits, and he would break out singing or whistling. “Why are you crying?” he would ask.
“How can you be so cruel?”
6
John Rene Heindell was living in New Orleans during the summer of 1963, but he and Oswald did not see each other (Affidavit of John Rene Heindell, Vol. 8, p. 318).
7
Oswald’s post office box number was 30061. But when he fashioned this stamp, he evidently reversed the two final numbers by mistake, so that both the leaflets and his forged vaccination certificate were printed with the wrong address. On the vaccination certificate, “Hidell” was misspelled “Hideel.” Dyslexia plus Oswald’s state of mind probably produced both errors.