Fair Play for Cuba Committee (FPCC)

[Magda Hassan]

The Fair Play for Cuba Committee (FPCC) was an activist group set up in New York 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 Committee 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 early notable supporters were William Appleman Williams, Norman Mailer, Allen Ginsberg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, as well as Latin Americans Waldo Frank and Carleton Beals.[2]
The committee later achieved notoriety through the activities of Lee Harvey Oswald in the New Orleans area, who was later the accused assassin of President of the United States John F. Kennedy. Like almost everything else associated with the Kennedy assassination, the Fair Play for Cuba Committee has been the subject of much speculation. It was often suspected of being a Soviet front with little real support outside of a few dedicated American Communists. On the contrary, it was closely connected to the Trotskyist Socialist Workers' Party. In more recent years it has also suspected of having largely or entirely been a puppet organization of the FBI or some other U.S. governmental agency used to identify Communists and Communist sympathizers. (Some of Oswald's FPCC leaflets were printed with the address "544 Camp Street" on them. This address was in the same building as the office of Guy Banister, an ex-FBI agent who was involved in counterintelligence activities.) Jim Garrison, through his investigation of the John F. Kennedy Assassination, insinuated the involvement of intelligence agencies in its activities in New Orleans[3].
In reality, however, 544 Camp Street was not Guy Banister's address. Both addresses certainly did lead into the same structure of cement and steel, but contrary to what one reads in many books, the 544 Camp Street entrance did not lead to Banister's ground-level office, but only up a stairway to the second floor. As onetime Banister employee Joe Newbrough puts it, "If you entered 544 Camp Street, the only way you could have gotten to Banister's office was to go out a window. Banister never even considered his office to be part of the Newman Building."
In his 2002 book, The Kennedy Conspiracy (2002), Anthony Summers asserted that documents indicate both the Central Intelligence Agency and the FBI infiltrated the FPCC. He quoted a CIA officer saying "We did everything we could to make sure it was not successful - to smear it... to penetrate it. I think Oswald may have been part of a penetration attempt."
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 November 22, 1963, Kennedy assassination made it impossible for the committee to continue its work. Although as of 2006, several groups are currently working to end the U.S. embargo against Cuba, none seem to be lineally descended from the Fair Play for Cuba Committee or to be interested in being associated with that exact name.[citation needed]
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