Where Were You?: America Remembers the JFK Assassination (19 page)

Carlos Bringuier

Born and raised in Cuba, where he worked as a lawyer, Carlos Bringuier came to America in 1961 and opened a clothing store in New Orleans called Casa Roca. In 1963 he was a twenty-nine-year-old exile, activist, and delegate to the anti-Castro Student Revolutionary Directorate. On August 9 of that year,
Lee Harvey Oswald
was handing out “Fair Play for Cuba Committee” leaflets when Bringuier started a fight with him. Both were arrested. A week later, Oswald debated the issue of
Fidel Castro
and
Cuba
with Bringuier on the Bill Stuckey Radio Show. Tony Plana played Bringuier in the 1991 Oliver Stone film
JFK.

I
had great faith and expectations for Kennedy. I thought he understood the Cuban situation and that he was going to solve the Cuban problem—and ultimately the problem of the United States—because Castro, a Communist ninety miles from the United States, was a very dangerous thing for the US democracy.

I heard about the Bay of Pigs plan in Guatemala right before I arrived in America. One of my brothers was already in the training camp in Guatemala, and from Argentina I went to Guatemala to visit my parents. I learned about the invasion then because my brother was training as a paratrooper. When I arrived in Miami, I came looking for work, but then I got taken over by the romanticism of those years, about freeing Cuba. So I signed up to go on the invasion. I was waiting to be transferred to Guatemala, but that never happened. My father-in-law wrote a letter from Argentina and warned me not to get involved in it, and I thank him for my life.

April 17, 1963, was the day of the invasion. April 15 was when they bombed the military airports and air bases in Cuba, and April 18 and
April 19 were when the fighters ran out of ammunition. But they were brave people. I was not happy with the way the Kennedys treated the people who participated in the Bay of Pigs.

There were not too many Cubans at that time here in New Orleans. At the time there were only maybe six hundred, eight hundred, but there were several organizations, and I was the delegate of the Cuban Student Directorate. I was talking with two young Americans one day when this man walked into their store and joined our conversation about Cuba. He explained that he had been in the Marine Corps in the United States, that he had trained in guerrilla warfare, and that he was willing to offer his services to us to train Cubans to fight against Castro.

I told him I didn’t have anything to do with military events, that my job in New Orleans was only as an anti-Castro man. It was only about press and propaganda. I was not involved in military activities. Then he put his hand in his pocket and offered money to help. I said, “I cannot take the money. You have to send that money to our headquarters in Miami.” The next day he showed up at the store again. I was not in the store. He left a guidebook for the Marines with my brother-in-law. His name was at the top: Lee Harvey Oswald.

When he was giving me the guidebook Oswald had left, my brother-in-law told me that Oswald looked like a very nice person. I said, “I don’t know. I have something in the back of my head, in the back of mind; for some reason I don’t trust him. I don’t know if he’s a Communist, an FBI agent, or whatever, OK? But there’s something in him—I don’t trust him.”

I didn’t know he had already tried to kill General Walker in Dallas.

That first meeting I had with Oswald was August 5.

The second time I met him in person was August 9—that was a Friday—in New Orleans. A Cuban by the name of Celso Hernandez came crawling to my store and told me he had seen an American on Canal Street with a sign that said
Viva Fidel!
Hands off Cuba
passing out some Communist pamphlets. So we went over there. We picked up another Cuban man, and we went looking on Canal Street. We could not find this American. We took a streetcar, and I had a big sign with me, with the Statue of Liberty stabbed in the back; it said
Danger! Cuba Lies in Chains 90 Miles Away
.

We took a streetcar, but we could not find him. Finally we came back, and I went back to the store. When I was in the store, a third Cuban, Miguel Cruz, came running into the store and said, “Hey, Celso discovered the American again on Canal Street, and Celso’s watching him.”

I took the sign again; we went down there, and I found Oswald in the 700 block of Canal Street after St. Charles. He was almost in front of the first store where I’d worked in New Orleans. Immediately I remembered him, and then he looked at me.

In the first moment he had a smirk on his face that looked like he was not happy with what was going on. But then Oswald extended his hand to shake hands with me. I refused to shake hands with him. And then, as Celso had been insulting him in Spanish—because Celso didn’t know any English—I started insulting him in English, calling him traitor, Communist, and different things. It was around two o’clock, I believe, and there several Americans surrounded us to watch what was going on.

I was angry, and I was going to punch Oswald. I took my glasses off and approached him to punch him. But in that moment he put his hand down and said, “OK, Carlos, if you want to hit me, hit me.”

That stopped me cold. My blood went cold. I said, “This guy knows what he’s doing. He wants me to break the law by punching him.” I decided not to punch him.

At that moment, Celso grabbed Oswald’s literature, tore it up, and threw it in the air. There was a policeman who used to patrol in that block, and he approached me and said, “OK, let him do his demonstration. Go to your place.” I said: “No! If in Cuba they don’t allow us to do this, I am not going to allow them to do this here.”

I turned to the people who were watching—there were maybe fifty or seventy of them—and I started explaining who Oswald was, that he had tried to infiltrate my organization. Then two police cars arrived, and we were taken to the First District police station.

In the First District station, they started questioning Oswald. At first he started answering questions. But when he was asked about the members of his organization, he refused to answer in front of me. Then he was moved to another room. That day we had to put down twenty-five dollars for a bail bond in order to get free.

The third time I saw Oswald was on August 12. That was the day of the trial at the Second Municipal Court. I thought that was the last time I was going to see him. I brought the guidebook for Marines to the courtroom. I showed it to the judge, and the front page where it had Oswald’s name on it, and I explained to the judge that the person who had originated the whole incident was Oswald, when he tried to infiltrate my organization. If he had not done that, then nothing would have happened on the day we had the problem.

The judge—I saw his eyes, and I knew he understood what I was saying. The judge dismissed the charges against us and fined Oswald ten dollars. That was the only time in history that Oswald was charged in a court of the United States and fined. I thought that was the end of it, the last time I was going to see him.

But then the next day, Bill Stuckey, a newsman from New Orleans, contacted me because he wanted to find out the address of Lee Harvey Oswald, to interview him. I said, “I don’t like that idea. They don’t allow us to go out in Cuba and be interviewed.” But then I sensed he had decided to do the interview anyway, and I said, “OK, instead of the interview why don’t you make a debate? That way both sides have the right to say their opinions, and the people can judge over the radio who is right and who is wrong.” That was a famous moment in New Orleans.

On August 16, a Cuban man left a message that Oswald was in front of the International House holding a demonstration. I went over there, but Oswald had already left.

A friend of mine from my school in Cuba, Carlos Quiroga, and I decided to send someone over to Oswald’s house posing as a pro-Castro
Cuban. This was to find out what the Fair Play for Cuba Committee was planning to do here in New Orleans. Quiroga went over there and had a conversation with Oswald on the porch. That conversation was when we found out that Oswald spoke Russian. At one moment a daughter of Oswald came to the porch, and Oswald grabbed her and talked to her in Russian. Quiroga asked him if that was Russian, and Oswald told one of his many lies: Yes, that was Russian; he was learning Russian at Tulane University. He never attended Tulane University.

The last time I saw Oswald was on August 21 when we had the debate at WDSU radio in New Orleans. In the studio during the debate, I didn’t feel at any moment that he was a violent man.

Before we arrived for the debate, we were in the lobby. At one moment the two of us were together, and I asked him why he didn’t change sides and try to help his family and his country—because what he was doing was wrong. He told me, “Carlos, I am on the right side. You are the one who is on the wrong side.”

Then we went in to the debate. I didn’t know that another person in that debate—Ed Butler from the Information Council of the Americas—had discovered things about Oswald that I didn’t know. They’d confirmed that Oswald was attempting to become a citizen of the Soviet Union as well as his defection from the United States to Russia. I was surprised by that. That was why I only spoke twice during the debate—I thought the other people had better weapons than mine, and my ego was not so big as to try to take over the debate.

But during the debate I asked Oswald one question that had never been asked of him before the assassination. I asked him if he agreed with the dictator, Fidel Castro, when on July 26 of that year he’d qualified President Kennedy as a ruffian and as a thief.

Oswald stopped for one second before answering: “I will not agree with that particular wording, but the United States government—” And then he started blaming the United States government. That was the only time before the assassination that Oswald was asked a question about President Kennedy.

After the debate, I issued a press release that I brought to the UPI, the AP, the newspapers, and the television stations. I asked the people of
New Orleans to write to their congressmen and ask for a congressional investigation of Lee Harvey Oswald, a confessed Marxist and an agent of Fidel Castro in the United States. Nobody paid attention to me.

At that time I had known Communists, and most of the Communists I knew, I believed, were dangerous. But I didn’t categorize him at that moment as violently dangerous. Oswald as an agent of Fidel Castro? Yes. He’d confessed that he was a Marxist, and to me anyone who was a Marxist committed the same crimes of the Marxists who put innocent people in front of the execution wall.

A relative of mine was working in a stock market company. He called the store and told me that Kennedy had been shot. They’d received a teletype that Kennedy had been shot in Dallas. That was the first news I had.

Ten minutes after that, he called back and said the teletype said that apparently he had been seriously injured because they saw blood in his hair. At that moment, my illusions of going back to Cuba deflated completely because, in my opinion, the only person in the United States who had a moral obligation to help us recover Cuba was President Kennedy. That was my first thought.

After that, I received a call from the delegate of the Cuban Revolutionary Council in New Orleans, Frank Bartes. He wanted me to sign a telegram with him to Jacqueline Kennedy, offering our condolences. I refused to join him in that. I said, “We have to wait.” I wanted to find out who was behind the assassination. In my mind, it could have been a stupid racist who was mad at Kennedy. It could have been Mafia people. It could have been Communist people. It could have been anyone from a spectrum of different ideologies. I said, “We have to find out who it is before we send a telegram of this type, because we have to word the telegram according to who is behind the assassination.”

After that, I left the store and went to my house. I was living in one of the poorest sections of New Orleans, in the St. Thomas Housing Project.
I was having a late lunch over there, and I had the radio on. I heard the name Lee Harvey Oswald. I jumped from the chair and went to the phone. I called the FBI first to tell them who Oswald was.