To the extent I knew anything about the “Fair Play for Cuba Committee” it was a passing reference to it being a no-name committee that existed to lure out Communists.
Its most famous member was Lee Harvey Oswald, who was photographed and video’d on August 16, 1963 handing out leaflets and pamphlets for the Committee on the streets of New Orleans, his hometown.
Being somewhat sympathetic, if not in complete agreement, with the Oliver Stone view of the Kennedy assassination cover-up, I kind of took it for granted that this was something of a fake organization. The kind of organization today that would be a simple PO Box and a bank account.
If you watch Oliver Stone’s 1991 “JFK” there are several scenes that easily lead you to believe that everything Oswald did was a small extension of Operation Mongoose and was just ‘fun and games’ by the Intelligence Community.
Here’s the relevant clip from “JFK”:
But that movie kind of whitewashes the truth of the “Fair Play for Cuba Committee.” The details about that organization get subsumed in the endless factual details around the Kennedy assassination.
I was listening to oral histories recorded about Alger Hiss, and one obscure one is from Penny Blum. New York University is where Hiss’ family files are stored, whereas Hiss’ personal professional files are at Harvard Law.
At about 10:00 minutes into the oral history, the speaker says she knew Hiss was heavily involved in the “Fair Play for Cuba Committee” during the period of its operation, between 1960-1963.
Here’s what she said specifically starting at 8:30 in, talking about what she and her husband used to talk about with Alger:
And I that's what I remember he may have said other things, but it certainly wasn't. I wasn't very up on it and I would never have asked him a question about anything. If I say mostly we talked about what ever was going on politically at the moment which angered him and he had lots of attitudes about, but it was not and I was also surprised at how left wing he was. He was he was extremely left, still, and expressed very strong, very left. Not communist, but very, very left opinions. And he, and I don't remember how or what but I remember that a number of times I was I was surprised and you know, there were opinions that I would have held and then people I knew would have held, and there weren't more or less than than lots and lots of people I knew, but I would have thought he was be a little more middle of the road and I was surprised at some of the things he said. I think — I don’t know whether I should say something that I'm not even sure of it but it seems to me that he had some interest in the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, which was… and that may be a mistake on my part. I'm not sure so I'm really hesitate to say it but I think I remember being surprised about that. I had friends who were very left who extremely left and they hadn't been very involved in Cuba. They were very anti Castro because of what happened to Cuba for their pleasure really now it wasn't really political attitudes so much as it was that Cuba wasn't much fun anymore. I don't think Alger was ever in Cuba and yet was very involved.
Blum was a friend of Alger, along with her husband, during the period after Hiss was released from Lewisburg prison and during the separation between Alger and Priscilla, and also the start of the relationship Alger had with Isabel Johnson.
Which tracks with the period of time that the Fair Play for Cuba Committee was active, which was between 1960-1963.
The Cuban Revolution had ended on January 1, 1959. Castro, who had been aided by the CIA and was falsely not seen at the time as a Communist, because of traitors within the U.S. State Department, actually toured the United States in April 1959. Castro met with the Council on Foreign Relations, and, later, Vice President Richard Nixon.
Here’s an amusing editorial noting that Castro was probably not a Communist even though all of his top aides were, from the April 17th 1959 Tampa Tribune published during Castro’s visit:
It wasn’t until December 2, 1961 that Fidel Castro announced that he was a Marxist-Leninist. By contrast, the Bay of Pigs was eight months prior, from April 17-21 of 1961.
But there were Americans who supported this Fair Play for Cuba Committee from the start, all the way through the moment when Oswald is accused of killing JFK.
Let’s just grant the Oliver Stone thesis for a moment, and assume the Fair Play for Cuba Committee was a kind of agent provocateur action by 1963. Well then, who was involved with it from January 1960 through April 1961, before it was self-evident that Castro was a Communist?
Were these people duped by the Communists? Were they morons?
Or were they subversives?
In later Senate testimony, it emerged that the first act of the organization was a full-page ad in the New York Times. Letters solicited funds from “Marjorie More.”
And yet, this person, Marjorie More, did not exist.
Testimony before the Senate shows that the group planned to lie about where its funding came from: the Cuban government.
The Committee was organized by Robert Taber, former correspondent with CBS News. Taber was a friend of Fidel’s, and accompanied him during the guerrilla fighting, and was even at the Bay of Pigs with Fidel.
The earliest news mention of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee is April 6, 1960. Here’s the brief reference:
I found an article that listed a random member of the Committee during this period. His name was Dan Rosenshine (1943-1991) from Michigan. His sole publication seems to be a book in 1976 about the “German Revolution of 1918-1919” aka the Spartacist Revolt of Communists trying to take over Germany. In 1964, he was charged for fighting policemen and defended by the Socialist Workers’ Party.
The purpose of the Committee is kind of left hazy by historians.
But it’s not hard to find that it was an influence operation on the nation’s elites and students. It was a membership organization that promoted tours to Communist Cuba.
Here’s how it’s referenced on Wikipedia: “…or the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, which advocated for a more balanced coverage of Cuba in the US media.”
These people just wanted fairness and balance in the media! Just like everyone.
Some of its more prominent members:
Norman Mailer - Novelist whose own fan club today acknowledges was a Marxist.
Truman Capote - Novelist who visited the Soviet Union twice in the 1950s, after the purges, Gulag, executions, and tried to write about the average people but later just gave up.
William Worthy - notorious for visiting Communist countries.
Robert Taber - CBS newsman, friend of Fidel
Carleton Beals - Historian, Author
Waldo Frank - Novelist who was a NYT Reporter at times, and also worked for the Communist Party USA
Alan Sagner - Co-Founder of the Committee, future head of the NY Port Authority, and also the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, in addition to owner of the Nation far-left magazine.
Kenneth Tynan - drama critic for the New Yorker, sexual degenerate
Jean Paul Sartre - Communist philosopher
Simone de Beauvoir - Communist philosopher, proponent of pedophilia and the repeal of age of consent laws
Robert F. Williams - Black leader who was accused of kidnapping a white couple, wherein he then fled to Cuba, and then Communist China, giving speeches in Vietnam in 1965 arguing for armed Communist revolution against the United States.
James Baldwin - Novelist
Frank London Brown - Novelist
John Henrik Clarke - Novelist
Julien Mayfield - Novelist, in his later biography claimed he joined the Communist Party in the 1940’s
John Killens - Novelist
Dr. W. E. DuBois - Known Communist
Shirley Graham - Novelist, wife of W.E.B. DuBois
Leroi Jones - Poet, Black Nationalist until 1974 when he became a public Marxist-Leninist, later faced controversy for poetry that said Israel had advance warning of the 9/11 attacks
Ossie Davis, Jr. - Actor
Edward Clark - Artist
When the Senate hearing investigated and determined that the Fair Play for Cuba Committee was a subversive Communist front organization funded by Cuba, one of its more prominent members was Sen. Thomas Dodd.
Sen. Dodd was a Democrat former DOJ prosecutor who prosecuted the Klan and who was a Nuremberg prosecutor. So for leftists he’s definitely a hard person to impeach or discredit. They still tried anyway to call it a Communist “Witch-Hunt.”
The hearings were so bad for the Committee that its founder, CBS Newsman Robert Taber, fled to Cuba.
At its height, the organization claimed almost 10,000 members. Here’s a relevant clipping, a retrospective on the Committee from 1965:
So as early as 1958, the State Department and CBS News reporters knew that Castro was a Communist and the Cuban revolution was red throughout. The Cubans used their money through the United Nations in order to fund and finance this influence operation in America to win people over.
And most of the public individuals involved with the Committee were deeply involved in far-left and Communist work elsewhere.
The far-left gets to organize subversion, influence operations, revolution, treason, sedition, perjury, right out in the open. And even when they are caught, the entire group gets memory-holed.
Even when one of their members is accused of being the lone gunman assassinating the President, the actual motives of your group get to be reduced to simply being a false flag for your opposition.
Imagine the cultural cache needed for a Presidential assassin’s obvious ideological allies to instead get entirely blamed on their political opponents.
Does anyone blame the abolitionists for Booth? Hancockites for Charles J. Guiteau? William Jennings Bryan for Leon Czolgosz? Jimmy Carter for Hinckley?
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So it shouldn’t be any surprise that Alger Hiss, recently released from prison in November 1954, would also be involved in this organization. It’s not a military-industrial complex agent provocateur program if Hiss is heavily involved.
Fascinating history on the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. I think that work stands on its own even without the tenuous connection to Hiss.