There’s no evidence that it is, but judge for yourself.
The National Enquirer says the man in the white shirt and thin tie seen at the beginning of this news footage is Rafael Cruz, father of Ted Cruz, Republican presidential candidate. Cruz, the tabloid says, “worked with” Oswald in August 1963, and thus is somehow implicated in Kennedy’s assassination three months later. I’m not a fan of Ted Cruz but I have to agree with his campaign’s statement that the allegation is “garbage.”
A couple of points worth noting.
1) In the still photo reproduced by the Enquirer the man alleged to be Cruz appears to be handing out pamphlets with Oswald. In the film version, however, he seems to have taken a pamphlet and talks to other passersby, and then vanishes, never to appear again. The man took a pamphlet. There is no visual evidence that he “worked with” Oswald.
2) The photo experts quoted by the Enquirer are absurdly vague in their “confirmation” that the man in question is Rafael Cruz. Comparing the footage to a photo of Cruz, Mitch Goldstone, president and CEO of ScanMyPhotos, a California-based digitizing photo service, said “There’s more similarity than dissimilarity.” This statement is also true when you compare photos of me and Brad Pitt. We’re both six feet tall, both have two eyes, two ears, a mouth, fair skin, light brown hair and so on. That does not exactly constitute confirmation that I am Angelina Jolie’s husband.
3) Oswald’s activities for the Fair Play for Cuba Committee in New Orleans are relevant to the JFK assassination story because they were immediately called to the attention of the FBI and the CIA. Indeed with a month, a FBI report on Oswald was delivered to a secret office in the CIA known as the Special Investigations Group, which sought to identify Soviet spies within the CIA. Why were the CIA’s mole hunters interested in Oswald? Good question for which there is no known answer.
When Oswald paid a visit to the Cuban Consulate in Mexico City in September 1963, the Special Investigations Group was notified again. The office drafted two cables about Oswald that were distributed to other U.S. government agencies and the CIA station in Mexico. Here’s one of those cables, date, October 10, 1963. On the last page, you can see the names and positions of the senior CIA officers who were knowledgable about Oswald’s travels, politics and foreign contacts six weeks before JFK was killed. The story here is the CIA’s interest in Lee Oswald, not Rafael Cruz’s.