Fair Play for Cuba Committee

The Fair Play for Cuba Committee (FPCC) was an activist group set up in New York City in April 1960.[1] The FPCC's purpose was to provide grassroots support for the Cuban Revolution against attacks by the United States government, once Fidel Castro began openly admitting his commitment to Marxism and began the expropriation and nationalization of Cuban assets belonging to U.S. corporations. The FPCC opposed the Bay of Pigs invasion of 1961, the imposition of the United States embargo against Cuba, and was sympathetic to the Cuban view during the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962.

Subsidiary Fair Play for Cuba groups were set up throughout the United States and Canada. Among its twenty-nine early notable supporters were William Appleman Williams, Norman Mailer, Truman Capote, James Baldwin, Jean-Paul Sartre, Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Waldo Frank. Alan Sagner and Carleton Beals.[2][3]

The Fair Play for Cuba Committee has been the subject of much speculation. It was accused by some of being a Soviet front, with little real support outside of a few dedicated American communists. However, it seems to have been connected to the Trotskyist Socialist Workers' Party.

The FPCC achieved notoriety through the activities of Lee Harvey Oswald in New Orleans. Oswald would later be accused of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

Vincent T. Lee shut down the national Fair Play for Cuba Committee in December 1963 when its landlord evicted the group from its national office; the notoriety accorded to it, following the Kennedy assassination, made it impossible for the committee to continue its work. The group continued to exist in Canada and still published several pamphlets until late 1964.

FPCC was organized by Robert Bruce Taber in 1960.[4][5]

References

  1. ↑ Richard Gott : Cuba a new History 177-178
  2. ↑ E.Van Gosse, Where the bous Are; Cuba and the Cold war, and the making of the new left,London 1993
  3. ↑ "Pro-Castro Organization Now Defunct" United Press International. December 29, 1963.
  4. ↑ Cassels, Louis (June 17, 1961). "Fair Play for Cuba Committee Activated". Lodi News-Sentinel. Lodi, California. UPI. p. 11. Retrieved May 29, 2013.
  5. ↑ Edson, Peter (October 21, 1962). "Edson in Washington; Defectors to Castro". The Park City Daily News. Bowling Green, Kentucky. NEA. p. 21. Retrieved May 29, 2013.

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