November 18 in Tampa

            My earlier installments on the files from the National Archives of Mexico prompted me to take a second look at Vincent T. Lee and Gilberto Policarpo Lopez.

            Several articles on Vincent Lee in the Tampa Times caught my eye.  He got his start in Tampa, where Ybor City, started around 1890 by a cigar manufacturer, was the center of a vibrant Cuban community.  In the immediate aftermath of the assassination, an article in the November 26, 1963 edition of the paper said “in 1959 it was no secret that Castro was a popular figure among Latins and Anglos.”  But after Castro took power, tensions between pro and anti-Castro forces started building. Lee took the lead with pro-Castro elements. He founded the Tampa chapter of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, drawing 250 people to its first meeting in early 1961.  He rose quickly to become head of the national FPCC in New York.

            In December 27, 1963, the Tampa paper reported that Lee had resigned from the FPCC. It added, without referencing its source, that the committee was “financed originally by the Castro Cuban delegation to the United Nations.”  In Murder, Inc., I point out that the FPCC and several other, left-wing organizations that Lee Harvey Oswald corresponded with were located in a small section of Greenwich Village in New York and were certainly accessible to the Cuban delegation at the UN.  I also noted that when the FBI broke into the FPCC’s New York headquarters, it acquired the Committee’s foreign mailing list, which included Fidel Castro himself in Havana.

            There is nothing in the Tampa paper about Gilberto Lopez, nor would one expect there would be. He had only moved there in June 1963.  Before that, he had lived and worked in Key West.  The FBI investigation of him found that the men he knew in Key West were anti-Castro whereas Lopez seemed pro-Castro. Perhaps he moved to Tampa to find a more congenial political atmosphere.

            John Kennedy visited Tampa on Monday, November 18, 1963.  It was a rather brief visit with the usual focus on politics.  Thus, he spoke to a crowd at the baseball stadium, then to the Chamber of Commerce, and finally to a union gathering.

            What was unusual about the visit, however, was that he spent almost an equal amount of time at a military facility, MacDill Air Force Base. Kennedy rarely wasted time on military bases. His charisma paid far better dividends when he was exposed to civilian crowds. But MacDill was headquarters of the U.S. Strike Command.  Its quick reaction forces might be needed if the CIA pulled off its planned coup in Cuba.  During the Cuban Missile Crisis, Kennedy was surprised to learn that the military didn’t have a quick reaction force.  He was told it would take eighteen days to have a force large enough to go into Cuba. So the visit to MacDill seemed designed for Kennedy to see how much progress had been made and whether it was ready to go to Cuba if needed.

            The White House had been worried about demonstrations by pro and anti- Castro elements in Tampa, but Kennedy’s visit went off without a hitch. FBI agent Moses Aleman, who would later do the investigation into Lopez’s activities, and his fellow agents received commendations from FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover for their work in providing security for Kennedy’s visit.

            However, in the same November 26, 1963, edition of the Tampa Times that carried the story on Lee, there was a second article reporting a rumor that Lee Harvey Oswald had been in Tampa during Kennedy’s visit. The article quoted the chief of police saying the rumor wasn’t true, and of course it wasn’t.  Besides, ominous, pre-assassination sightings of Oswald were as common as those of Bigfoot. Nonetheless, one wonders if the rumor was based on a grain of truth that it was Lopez who was up to no good. I am sorry that I didn’t know about this newspaper article in my conversations with Moses Aleman.  But then I doubt that he heard or remembered any such rumor or else he would have volunteered it in our discussions.

            The point is the same that I make in Murder, Inc.  With few exceptions, the investigation of Kennedy's assassination veered away from leads suggesting a foreign conspiracy.