This was part of a running feud between the Kennedys and the Mafia, which had lost their cushy domination of the casinos in Battista’s Cuba. The failed Bay of Pigs invasion, preventing the takeback of the Cuban archipelago island chain, was a point of sharp contention between the JFK Administration and the East Coast Mafioso. Another player in this game was Cuba’s Castro, who was beginning to feel the pinch of the embargo that had been laid on Cuba following the missile crisis. It is highly telling that the assassin sent to take down JFK was tied in a number of ways with the Castro regime, but those connections were either covered up and denied, or downplayed to the point of insignificance.
JFK, all along, had been working with the Mafia, and Castro was counterpunching, below the belt. The Soviet Union was forced to stand off, but they lent their expertise to the Cubans, and that, in large part, was how Lee Harvey Oswald was put into place.
The rest, as they say, became history. But the basis is still only poorly understood by the public, and lies buried in archives that are still sealed for decades to come.
If people still wonder why the embargo against the Castro regime lasted for so many decades, it was kept in place as a memorial to John F. Kennedy.
“This was part of a running feud between the Kennedys and the Mafia”
You left out the most important part. The Mafia was essential to Old Joe’s plan to get his son elected. While there is no proof that JFK ever knew what was going on, he wouldn’t have been President WITHOUT the Mafia’s help. This was supposed to have bought them peace an quite. Unfortunately Robert Kennedy had other ideas. By then Old Joe was a zombie from a stroke, but as one of the Mafia heads said on an FBI tape recording, “if taking his life don’t mean nothing to him, then we take what he wanted most!”