At the Cuban embassy Lee fell into the sympathetic hands of Sylvia Duran, a twenty-six-year-old Mexican woman who was a Cuban consular official. He displayed a sheaf of documents, including his new and his expired passports, which showed that he had lived in the USSR; the labor card he had had in Minsk, showing that he had worked there; his marriage certificate; his correspondence with the US Communist Party and the Soviet embassy in Washington, some of which was in Russian; his two Fair Play for Cuba cards, one signed by “A. J. Hidell,” the other by Vincent T. Lee; and his “résumé,” the several looseleaf, handwritten sheets on which he had summarized his life as an “Organizer,” “Marxist,” “Defector,” and so on.
Mrs. Duran was impressed by all this, especially the fact that Oswald was the leader of an organization calling for “Fair Treatment for Cuba.” “Admittedly exceeding [her] responsibilities,” as she put it later, she “semi-officially” telephoned someone at the Soviet consulate to see if she could facilitate issuance of a Soviet visa to Oswald but was told that it would take at least four months. When she informed Lee that a Cuban visa could not be issued until he had a Soviet visa, he became annoyed and said he had a right to go to Cuba in view of his background and loyalty and his activities in behalf of the Cuban movement. Mrs. Duran told him that she could do nothing more.
On Saturday morning Lee returned to the Cuban embassy, and Mrs. Duran put him into direct contact with one or two persons at the Soviet embassy, probably by telephone. The story was still the same, and Lee became so excited and angry that Mrs. Duran begged the Cuban consul, Señor Eusebio Asque, to come out of his office and talk to Oswald himself. Asque likewise called the Soviet consulate and confirmed that there would be a waiting period of four to six months. He suggested to Oswald that he leave Mexico and return when he had a Soviet visa, at which point he would be given a Cuban transit visa.
At that, Lee again became furious and demanded his rights in a scene that may have resembled his behavior at the American embassy in Moscow in 1959. Exasperated, Asque finally told him that if it were up to him he would not give him a visa at all, and that “a person of his type was harming the Cuban Revolution rather than helping it.” But Mrs. Duran apparently took pity on Lee. She handed him a slip of paper with her name and telephone number on it, and she went ahead and processed his visa application. Fifteen to thirty days later, a routine reply arrived from Havana approving Oswald’s visa application on condition that the Soviet visa be obtained first.
There was nothing more Lee could do. On Sunday he apparently visited museums and did some sightseeing in Mexico City.[8] On Monday he went to a travel agency and purchased bus tickets from Mexico City to Laredo and thence to Dallas. And on Tuesday, October 1, he attempted a final assault on the fortress of Soviet bureaucracy. He somehow contacted the Soviet military attaché and asked whether a reply had been received to a telegram that the Soviet consul had promised to send the embassy in Washington. The military attaché referred to him to the consulate. A guard outside the consulate went inside and returned with the message that the telegram had been sent but no reply had been received.[9]
His visit a failure, Lee left Mexico City by bus on Wednesday, October 2. Even his departure was troubled. In the middle of the night he was pulled off the bus at the border by Mexican officials because of a supposed irregularity in his tourist papers and was heard to grumble as he climbed back on, “My papers were in order before and I don’t know why they bother me now.” At the US customs station in Laredo at 1:30 in the morning of October 3, he was seen “gulping down” a banana. A customs official reassured him that he would be allowed to take it into the United States and did not have to eat so fast.[10]
By 2:30 on the afternoon of October 3, Lee was in Dallas, only one week and one day after leaving New Orleans. He had spent perhaps $100 on the trip, but its cost to him could not be measured only in money. The real cost was the destruction of his hope. He had yearned to belong, to join a cause, to become a revolutionary, a volunteer for “Uncle Fidel.” He had wanted to deploy his shooting skills in behalf of a tiny, embattled country that surely needed him. Instead, he was told by no less a figure than the Cuban consul that people like him were harmful to the cause of revolution. He must have suffered a grave new wound to his self-esteem.
Lee was left with nowhere to go. If he ever had real thoughts of moving to the Northeast and becoming a political activist, those thoughts evaporated now. He lacked emotional energy to strike out for any place new. It was the most he could do to crawl back to the old places and attempt to do what he had done before: get a job, save money, support Marina and his children.
He did not even call Marina when he arrived in Dallas. He went straight to the offices of the Texas Employment Commission, filed a claim for the last of his unemployment compensation checks, and announced that he was once again looking for a job.[11] He then went to the YMCA—the same Y where he had stayed one year before—registered as a serviceman so he would not have to pay a membership fee, and spent the night there.[12]
Next morning he went to Padgett Printing Corporation in response to a newspaper advertisement and applied for a job as a typesetter in the composing room. Theodore Gangl, the plant superintendent who interviewed him, said he was “well dressed and neat” and “made a favorable impression” on the foreman. Gangl was inclined to hire him, especially since he already had experience at Jaggars-Chiles-Stovall. But after he spoke to Robert Stovall on the telephone later in the day, he made the following notation at the bottom of Oswald’s job application: “Bob Stovall does not recommend this man. He was released because of his record as a troublemaker. Has communistic tendencies.”[13] Lee did not get the job.
He called Marina only after his interview. She was very happy to hear his voice and relieved beyond measure that he had not gone to Cuba. He asked to have Ruth drive to town to pick him up. Marina explained that Ruth had just given blood at Parkland Hospital in case it was needed during the baby’s birth and was not up to the long drive to Dallas. So Lee hitchhiked and got a ride all the way to the Paines’ house with a black man. He was there before lunch.
Marina stood in the bedroom and stared at the prodigal who had come home to her. He kissed her and asked if she had missed him? Then he started right in: “Ah, they’re such terrible bureaucrats that nothing came of it after all.” He described his shuttling from embassy to embassy, how each one told him he had to wait and wait, and see what the other one did, and how the whole time he had been worried about running out of money. He was especially vociferous about the Cubans—“the same kind of bureaucrats as in Russia. No point going there.” Marina was so delighted that she could scarcely believe her ears. Indeed, Lee’s disenchantment with Castro and Cuba was complete. He never again talked about “Uncle Fidel,” nor sang the song “Viva Fidel,” as he used to do, nor used the alias “Hidell.”
In spite of his disappointment, Marina thought he seemed happy, his spirits vastly improved over what they had been before he went to Mexico. He followed her like a puppy dog around the house, kissed her again and again, and kept saying, “I’ve missed you so.”
8
On August 27, 1964, I was present when Marina came across several items of Oswald’s which had not been previously confiscated. They included a portion of his return bus ticket; a booklet called “This Week—Esta Semana,” a schedule of events for the week September 28–October 4 in Mexico City; and a folding guide map of the city, which included an enlarged map of the downtown area. Oswald had marked several sites on the downtown map: the bus terminals at which he arrived and from which he departed; his hotel; a travel agency; the Cuban and Soviet diplomatic establishments; the Plaza Mexico bullfight arena; and the Palace of Fine Arts. On the index beside the map he had also marked several places of historical interest, a theater, and the Anthropology and Natural History museums (Exhibits No. 1400, Vol. 22, p. 739, No. 3073, Vol. 26, pp. 667–676, and Nos. 2488–2489, Vol. 25, pp. 689–706). And on the booklet, “Esta Semana,” he had written his own name in full, both in Latin and Cyrillic, and had added a doodle, which proved on close inspection to be a tiny, fancy, old-fashioned-looking dagger, drawn very carefully in ink.
9
According to the Soviet defector Yury Nosenko, a decision was made by the KGB in Moscow to deny Oswald a reentry visa.
10
Exhibit No. 2460, Vol. 25, pp. 618–619; Warren Commission Document No. 872 (declassified November 3, 1970), pp. 4–8.
13
Affidavit of Theodore Frank Gangl, Vol. 11, pp. 478–479, and Gangl Exhibit No. 1, Vol. 20, p. 3. On this job application, October 4, and on another, October 10, Oswald gave the name of George de Mohrenschildt as a reference.