April 22, 1961: 63 years ago, April 21 1961, the Fair Play for Cuba Committee organized a [...]

63 years ago, April 21 1961, the Fair Play for Cuba Committee organized a march in San Francisco in response to the failed Bay of Pigs invasion. Hundreds gathered, marching from Market St. to Union Square and the Federal Building, to demand an end to the U.S. invasion of Cuba

Speakers at the demonstration included then Berkeley sociology graduate student Maurice Zeitlin, who went on to become a scholar of Cuban history and politics, and Matthew “Dynamite” Hallihan, a lifelong Bay Area communist organizer involved in dozens of radical organizations

The Fair Play for Cuba Committee was formed just one year prior to the rally, in April 1960, after two CBS newsmen ran a full page ad in the New York Times endorsing the Cuban revolution

The authors of the ad received over a thousand letters of support, including notable letters from Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre, Norman Mailer, James Baldwin, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and Allen Ginsberg

Within just six months, the FPCC had over 7000 members in 27 chapters and 40 student councils on various university campuses. The main aim of the organization was to stop the U.S. embargo of Cuba and to end U.S. attempts at destabilizing the newly formed Cuban government