Marina Oswald testified that her husband engaged in Fair Play for Cuba Committee activities "primarily for purposes of self-advertising. He wanted to be arrested. I think he wanted to get into the newspapers, so that he would be known." 379 According to Marina Oswald, he thought that would help him when he got to Cuba.380 He asked his wife to help him to hijack an airplane to get there, but gave up that scheme when she refused.381

During this period Oswald may have practiced opening and closing the bolt on his rifle in a screened porch in his apartment.382 In September he began to review Spanish.333 He approved arrangements for his family to return to Irving, Tex., to live with Mrs. Ruth Paine.384 On September 20, 1963, Mrs. Paine and her two children arrived in New Orleans from a trip to the East Coast 385 and left for Irving with Marina Oswald and June and most of the Oswalds' effects 3 days later.386 While Marina Oswald knew of her husband's plan to go to Mexico and thence to Cuba if possible,387 Mrs. Paine was told that Oswald was going to Houston and possibly to Philadelphia to look for work.388

Oswald left for Mexico City on September 25, 1963, and arrived on September 27, 1963. He went almost directly. to the Cuban Embassy and applied for a visa to Cuba in transit to Russia.389 Representing himself as the head of the New Orleans branch of the "organization called 'Fair Play for Cuba,' he stated his desire that he should be accepted as a 'friend' of the Cuban Revolution." 390 He apparently based his claim for a visa in transit to Russia on his previous residence, his work permit for that country, and several unidentified letters in the Russian language. The Cubans would not, however, give him a visa until he had received one from the Soviets, which involved a delay of several months. When faced with that situation Oswald became greatly agitated, and although he later unsuccessfully attempted to obtain a Soviet visa at the Soviet Embassy in Mexico City, he insisted that he was entitled to the Cuban visa because of his background, partisanship, and personal activities on behalf of the Cuban movement. He engaged in an angry argument with the consul who finally told him that "as far as he was concerned he would not give him a visa" and that. "a person like him [Oswald] in place of aiding the Cuban Revolution, was doing it harm." 391

Oswald must have been thoroughly disillusioned when he left Mexico City on October 2, 1963. In spite of his former residence in the Soviet Union and his Fair Play for Cuba Committee activities he had been rebuffed by the officials of both Cuba and the Soviet Union it. Mexico City. Now there appeared to be no chance to get to Cuba, where he had thought he might find his communist ideal. The U.S. Government would not permit travel there and as far as the perform- ante of the Cubans themselves was concerned, he was "disappointed at not being able to get to Cuba, and he didn't have any great desire to do so any more because he had run into, as he himself said--into bureaucracy and red tape." 392