Reclaiming History (291 page)

But when the Odios subsequently learned, as did most Cubans, that the promise of the revolution to restore democracy in Cuba was illusory—that it had merely replaced one dictator (Batista) with another (Castro) and that Castro had betrayed the revolution and was in fact a Marxist who apparently had concealed this fact to further his revolutionary goals—they became founding members, with Manuel “Manolo” Ray and others, of Movimiento Revolucionario del Pueblo (MRP), an anti-Castro organization. Members of the MRP frequently utilized the Odios’ home in Havana and their small farm near Havana to conduct MRP activities. This led to the arrest and imprisonment of Amador and Sarah by the Castro regime in 1961, the two receiving long prison terms.
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As a teenager, Sylvia had been sent to the Eden Hall Convent of the Sacred Heart in Philadelphia for high school and graduated in 1954. She returned to Cuba to enter the University of Villanova, where she studied law. On the side she wrote stories published in Latin American literary magazines. She abandoned her studies after three years in 1957 to marry Guillermo Herrera, son of a Havana family that other Cuban exiles described as “cultured, old, extremely wealthy, and socially well-known.” Soon after the wedding, the young couple lived for nine months in New Orleans.
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At the time of her parents’ arrest, Sylvia was twenty-four and living in Ponce, Puerto Rico, with her husband and four children. The following year, her husband deserted her and the children. The imprisonment of her parents and the sudden transformation of her life from one of privilege and wealth to that of deprivation, causing her to be left alone to fend for herself and her children, induced emotional problems.
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Mrs. Lucille Connell, a close friend of Sylvia’s, said that Sylvia had a condition much more common in Latin than in American women—when “conscious reality” got “too painful to bear” for Sylvia, she sometimes would go “completely unconscious.”
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Annie and Sarita, Sylvia’s younger sisters, had settled in Dallas before Sylvia. Sarita, a student at the University of Dallas, had become friendly with Connell, a Dallas society matron who provided financial and social assistance to the Dallas Cuban Refugee Center. Connell was also active in the Mental Health Association of Dallas, and her son was a psychiatrist. Talking about Dallas’s conservatism, she said that in Dallas, being active in mental health activities “would [alone] make you a part of the Communist plot.” When she learned of Sylvia’s plight from Sarita, Connell sent Sylvia part of her airfare to come to Dallas for a visit with her sister in March 1963. She also made efforts to find an appropriate psychiatrist for Sylvia, and they eventually settled on Dr. Burton C. Einspruch at the Southwestern Medical School, who started treating her in April with some success. Connell, with whom Sylvia was staying, noticed that the fainting tapered off and eventually ended.
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At the end of June, Sylvia went back to Puerto Rico to collect her four young children and settle them in her new apartment at 1084 Magellan Circle in Dallas.
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Bright and pretty, well educated, charming, and imbued with the social graces imparted to her by the sisters of the Sacred Heart, whose mission was to provide superior education for “the daughters of gentlefolk,” Sylvia, through Connell’s introductions, became acquainted with and accepted by the highest strata of Dallas society, including the family of John Rogers, who owned Texas Industries (she stayed with the Rogers family for a period after her hospitalization following JFK’s death). For a time she dated Lawrence Marcus, one of the owners of the exclusive department store Neiman Marcus, where she worked for a while. In fact, her psychiatrist, Dr. Einspruch, who got to know Sylvia well, said that Miss Odio had unquestionably passed Mrs. Connell on the social ladder and was “at the very top” in Dallas.
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By September, when she was working at the National Chemsearch Company in Irving, her emotional problems had subsided, and she was planning to move to a better apartment closer to her work. The last week of September, her seventeen-year-old sister, Annie, came to the Magellan Circle apartment to help Sylvia pack for the move on October 1, and to tend to Sylvia’s children.
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As alluded to briefly in the Oswald biography in this book, Sylvia Odio testified before the Warren Commission that the week prior to the October 1 moving date, as she was getting dressed to go out to a friend’s house just before 9:00 p.m., the doorbell rang and her sister Annie went to the door. When Annie came back and said, “Sylvia, there are three men at the door,” Sylvia put on her housecoat and went to the door. With October 1, 1963, as a reference date, she said the visit was either the previous Thursday (September 26) or Friday (September 27) evening.

Two of the men at the door, she testified, appeared to be Cubans. The third was an American. The Cubans, she said, told her they were very good friends of Sylvia’s father (about whom, she testified, they knew “almost incredible details,” including where he was imprisoned on the Isle of Pines, Fidel Castro’s Devil’s Island in Cuba) and members of JURE (the Cuban Revolutionary Junta), the anti-Castro organization that succeeded MRP and of which Sylvia herself was a member in Dallas. JURE was headed by Manolo Ray, who in the earlier MRP years had often hidden from Castro in the Odios’ Havana residence. She testified that the two Cubans identified themselves only by their fictitious underground “war names.” She recalls one of the Cubans’ names as being “Leopoldo.” He was the taller of the two Cubans and did most of the talking. The other one’s name was “something like Angelo.” She said “they both looked very greasy, like the kind of low Cubans, not educated at all.” Leopoldo said, “We wanted you to meet this American. His name is Leon Oswald,” mentioning his name twice. For the most part, the American kept quiet, saying “just a few little words in Spanish, trying to be cute…like ‘Hola.’” When Sylvia asked him if he had ever been to Cuba, he said he had not.
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She described the American as being around five feet ten inches tall and “kind of a skinny man, a description that generally fits Oswald.” For those who believe Odio might have fabricated her whole story from media accounts, she apparently wasn’t aware of something that had been widely published—Oswald’s age of twenty-four. In her testimony to the Warren Commission, nearly a year after the assassination, she said she guessed that “Leon” was about thirty-four or thirty-five at the time she met him.

“Have you,” Warren Commission counsel asked, “read the newspapers and watched television since the assassination and observed Oswald?”

“I read some of it,” Sylvia answered.

“Did you read how old he was?”

“I don’t even know what age he is.”
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If this was fabrication, it was clever indeed.

Odio testified that Leopoldo told her they had just come from New Orleans. One of the Cubans took out a letter written in Spanish asking for donations to help fund JURE activities. The Cubans wanted Sylvia to translate the petition into English and to send it out seeking funds. Not only had other small groups of Cubans come to her door asking her to help with JURE, but Antonio Alentado, the head of JURE in Dallas, had earlier shown her the same petition and made the same request. Because she was very busy with her job and four children, she had declined to become that actively involved in the Dallas chapter of JURE. When she asked the Cubans if they had been sent by Alentado and they said no, that they were trying to organize the Dallas area on their own, she told them she would be unable to help them. (Odio told FBI agent James Hosty in her first interview with the authorities on December 18, 1963, that she declined to help because her parents were still in prison in Cuba and she feared they would possibly be harmed.) Watching the three men drive off through the window of her apartment, she noticed that Leopoldo was driving. The next day, Odio testified, Leopoldo called her after she got home from work. She felt he was trying to get “fresh” with her, “trying to be too nice, telling me that I was pretty.” He then asked her what she thought of the American. When she replied she “didn’t think anything,” he proceeded to tell her they wanted to introduce Leon (over the telephone Leopoldo never mentioned the name Oswald) to the underground because “he is great, he is kind of nuts. He told us we don’t have any guts…because President Kennedy should have been assassinated after the Bay of Pigs and some Cubans should have done that because he was the one that was holding the freedom of Cuba, actually.” Killing the president, the American had said, would be “so easy to do.” Leopoldo said that Leon was a former marine and an “expert shotman,” and told Odio the American was the type who might be able to go underground in Cuba and kill Castro.
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Three days after the three men visited her, Sylvia said she wrote to her father at the Nueva Gerona prison on the Isle of Pines in Cuba asking him if he knew the two Cuban visitors who came to her door purporting to be his friends. She recalls giving him the war names of one or two of the Cubans, but said she probably only referred to the third man as an “American.”
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It was Christmas Day 1963 before Amador was allowed to write back. In his letter to “My children” (his ten sons and daughters, all of whom he and Sarah had removed from Cuba to safety and who now lived in Miami and Dallas, the younger ones in orphanages), the words were meticulously printed in very tiny letters on one sheet with no margins, making the most of the single page he was allowed to write on. It is a letter of a man struggling hard to keep his family together spiritually in spite of the circumstances that had scattered them in exile, and it is full of praise, exhortations, admonitions, and hope for the future. Eventually he speaks directly to Sylvia about her mysterious visitors, and underlines his words. “Tell me
who this is who says he is my friend
,” he writes. “
Be careful. I do not have any friend who might be here, through Dallas, so reject his friendship until you give me his name
.”
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It was no doubt good advice. Refugees whose friends and relatives were held prisoner in Cuba were preyed on by scam artists who claimed they could help secure release of prisoners in much the way people with incurable diseases are preyed on by quacks. Moreover, the security problems of the anti-Castro underground in America were great. No one knew which of their friends and colleagues might be spies for the Castro regime.

Although Odio testified she may have told Lucille Connell about the visit from the three men, the only other person she is certain she told before the assassination was her psychiatrist, Dr. Einspruch.
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Einspruch confirmed in a deposition given to the HSCA on July 11, 1978, that Odio had told him, prior to the assassination, of the visit from the three men. He said she told him two of the men were “Cubans or Latins” and the third man was an “Anglo,” though he did not recall whether or not she mentioned his name was Leon at that time. He said she did, however, after the assassination, when she identified Leon as Oswald to him. Einspruch did not recall Odio ever telling him that Leopoldo had called her a day later and told her about Leon saying that Kennedy should be assassinated.
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At the time of the assassination, Sylvia was still working at National Chemsearch. The company manufactured and sold products like soap and cleanser to large companies and institutions, not retail stores, and because she was bilingual, she worked in its International Department taking orders from Latin countries.
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When Sylvia returned to work from lunch on November 22, 1963, and learned the president had been assassinated, she passed out and was taken by ambulance to a hospital in Irving. Though there had been no mention of Oswald on the news yet, she “established a connection” in her mind between the assassination and the visit of the three men, particularly the reference to the fact that “the Cubans should have killed President Kennedy…I was so upset about it. So probably the lunch had something to do with it, too, and I was so upset, that that is why I probably passed out.”
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Because the two non-Anglos at her door were anti-Castro Cubans, Odio would later say that her immediate fear that Cuban exiles might be accused of the president’s death may have contributed to her fainting.
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Odio said that when she saw Oswald on television later that day from her hospital room, she immediately recognized him as the Anglo Leon. “I kept saying it can’t be to myself; it just can’t be. I mean it couldn’t be, but when my sister walked into the hospital [room] and she said, ‘Sylvia, have you seen the man?’…I said, yes, and she said, ‘That was the man that was at the door’…so I had no doubts then.” When asked by Warren Commission counsel if she had any doubts that Leon was Oswald, she replied, “I don’t have any doubt.”
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Odio did not contact the authorities about the visit from the two Cubans and the man she was now certain was Oswald. She told an HSCA investigator in 1976 that she and her sister were extremely frightened and worried about the welfare of their parents in Cuba and of their brothers and sisters, not knowing if others were involved in the assassination and what the consequences to them and their family would be if they came forward. “I never wanted to go to the [authorities]. I was afraid. I was young at the time, I was recently divorced, I had young children, I was going through hell. Besides, it was such a responsibility to get involved because who is going to believe you? Who is going to believe that I had Oswald in my house? I was scared and my sister Annie was very scared at the time.”
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On August 28, 1964, the Warren Commission’s chief counsel, J. Lee Rankin, wrote to FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, stating that “it is a matter of some importance to the Commission that Mrs. Odio’s allegations either be proved or disproved.”
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T
he two questions, of course, that bedeviled and concerned the Warren Commission (as well as the HSCA) were whether or not two Cubans and an American did in fact visit Odio in September of 1963, and much more importantly, if they did, whether the American was Oswald. Although not explicitly stating it, the Warren Report implies that the Commission did believe there was such a visit,
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never once seeming to question her story about the two Latin men and one American man coming to her door. However, the Commission concluded that Oswald was not the American man because he could not have been in Dallas on the dates and time given by Miss Odio, around 9:00 p.m. on September 26 or 27, 1963, and, indeed, “Oswald was not at Miss Odio’s apartment in September of 1963.”
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