May 22, 1963 - President Kennedy charged today that the Republicans “know it is untrue” when they raise the possibility that he plans to abandon the Guantanamo naval base in Cuba. “I would hope that we would find a good deal more realism in the Republican conversations about foreign policies, because that is untrue,” the President said at his news conference. “They know it is untrue. But it may be the sort of thing we are going to hear now for the next 18 months.” It is almost exactly 18 months until the Presidential election of 1964. To make his point clear, Mr. Kennedy said the Guantanamo charge “indicates, as some people suspected before, that there was some political motivation in some of the attacks upon our policy with regard to Cuba.” As for the charge itself, Mr. Kennedy said it was “completely untrue.” Abandoning Guantanamo, he said, “has never been considered. It will not be done.”
