In an extraordinary tape recording played before the House Assassinations Committee yesterday, Cuban President Fidel Castro denied any complicity in the assassination of President Kennedy and insisted that a warning he issued 2 1/2 months before the 1963 murder had been widely misunderstood.

His voice echoing through the Cannon Building caucus room, followed phrase for phrase by a Spanish interpreter, Castro said he had simply been trying to warn U.S. officials that he was aware of plots against his life sponsored by the Central Intelligence Agency.

‘’So, I said something like those plots start to set a very bad precedent, a very serious one - [and] that that could become a boomerang against the authors of those actions," Castro declared. "But I did not mean to threaten by that . . . I did not mean by that that we were going to take measures - similar measures - like a retaligtion for that."

Castro had made his seemingly ominous remarks to an Associated Press reporter he had called aside on Sept. 7, 1963, during a reception at the Brazillian embassy in Havana. "United States leaders," he warned at the time, "should think that if they are aiding terrorist plans to eliminate Cuban leaders, they themselves will not be safe."

Committee and staff members who interviewed Castro for more than four hours in Havana last April 3 neglected to ask what prompted his remarks that day or why he chose the Brazillian embassy for his forum.

It was reportedly in September 1963, however, that a longtime confidant of Castro, Rolando Cubela, met with CIA case officers in Sao Paulo, Brazil, and said he would be willing to attempt Castro's assassination if the U.S. government would support him.

According to Edward J. Epstein's recent book, "Legend: The Secret World of Lee Harvey Oswald," Cubela's startling offer was communicated to CIA headquarters on Saturday, Sept. 7, 1963. Castro's remarks at the embassy in Havana the same day reportedly raised suspicious among some CIA officials that Cubela, code-named Amlash, might be a double agent.

The interview with Castro was played as the House committee reached what appears to be a dead end in its efforts to resolve the question of possible foreign entanglements in the president's assassination in Dalas on Nov. 22, 1963.

The Soviet Union has refused the committee's request for various documents, including the KGB's voluminous surveillance files on Oswald during his 2 1/2-year stay there. Yesterday, chief committee counsel G. Robert Blakey reported that the panel has been "largely frustrated in its attempts to investigate the nature of Lee Harvey Oswald's activities and possible associations in Mexico City" in late September and early October of 1963.


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