I am requesting formal membership in your organization.
In the past I have received from you pamphlets etc., both bought by me and given to me by you.
Now that I live in New Orleans I have been thinking about renting a small office at my own expense for the purpose of forming a F.P.C.C. branch here in New Orleans.
Could you give me a charter?
Also I would like information on buying pamphlets etc. in large lots, as well as blank F.P.C.C. applications etc.
Also a picture of Fidel, suitable for framing would be a welcome touch.
Offices down here rent for $30 a month and if I had a steady flow of literature I would be glad to take the expense.
Of course I work and could not supervise the office at all times but I’m sure I could get some volunteers to do it.
Could you add some advice or recommendations?
I am not saying this project would be a roaring success, but I am willing to try.
An office, literature, and getting people to know you are the fundamentals of the F.P.C.C. as far as I can see so here’s hoping to hear from you.
Why this sudden burst of political activism? Albert H. Newman has suggested that Oswald wanted to establish a pro-Castro record in New Orleans so he could attain a visa to Cuba which he could then use as an escape route after he returned to Dallas to make another attempt on Walker’s life. Newman pointed out that during his stay in Dallas Oswald had gone out of his way to conceal his whereabouts. On his job applications and correspondence, he had given a box number, not a home address. And as far as Oswald knew, the FBI hadn’t tracked him from Fort Worth to Dallas. In New Orleans, however, he made no secret of his Magazine Street address, and he would soon become engaged in political activities that would inevitably draw the attention of the local police and FBI. Oswald wanted visibility in New Orleans, but had wanted to stay hidden in Dallas. Newman believes that the sentence in the letter above beginning, “Now that I live in New Orleans …” reflects this change in tactics. But it doesn’t necessarily follow that Oswald planned to go back to Dallas. It may be that he simply realized he would have to establish his reputation as an activist somewhere else—making himself known as a Castro supporter in Dallas might have made him a suspect in the still-unsolved Walker shooting.
The first part of Newman’s theory is well established. There’s little doubt that Oswald’s pro-Castro activities were designed to help him get into Cuba and be warmly received once he got there. Marina has testified that although her husband wanted to help the Cuban revolution, she knew “that his basic desire was to get to Cuba by any means and that all the rest of it was window dressing for that purpose.” There is more than Marina’s testimony to support this. Oswald’s attempt to enter Cuba would be a repetition of his earlier defection, but with a difference. He had had some difficulty being accepted by the Soviets because he carried no credentials. They had asked for papers to show who and what he was, and he had none. This time he would have plenty of papers showing his ideological record. Throughout that summer he would write to the Fair Play Committee, the Communist party, and The Worker telling them of his political work, and he would save their replies. He would write up the details of his work under such headings as Marxist, Street Agitation, Radio Speaker, and Lecturer. In the fall he would present this material when he applied for a Cuban visa in Mexico City. (We know this because the résumé material was found among Oswald’s belongings after the assassination, and an employee at the Cuban Embassy described some of these credentials to the Mexican police.)
What did Oswald hope to do after he got to Cuba? Certainly, he didn’t expect to be given factory work or be sent to a Cuban equivalent of Minsk. Oswald had a rigid and willful personality, seemingly incapable of fundamental change; he kept repeating the same patterns over and over. Disappointed by his reception in Russia, he probably expected that the Cubans would recognize his abilities and give him the important assignment he thought he deserved.
It may be that he returned to the dream he had discussed with Nelson Delgado just four years before—becoming an officer in Castro’s army to lead a revolution in another country. This was not as fantastic an ambition as it might seem. In 1963 it was illegal for Americans to travel to Cuba. But during March there had been a flurry in the press about a so-called “subversion airlift” flying between Mexico City and Havana. Some of these stories appeared in Time, a publication Oswald subscribed to (although it isn’t known whether he saw them). On March 29, for instance, the magazine reported that there were twice-weekly flights from Mexico City and that, in 1962 alone, approximately 1500 Latin Americans and others had been taken to Cuba for “indoctrination and guerrilla warfare training.” Time claimed that “thousands of students, small-time labor leaders, intellectuals and professional men” were getting “all-expense-paid tours” of Cuba and that many returned to their countries to become “terrorists, guerrillas, and Communist party workers.” The article said that until February 15 “it was no trick to fly to Mexico, where the Cuban embassy issued a visa on a slip of paper. No telltale stamp marred the passports. Now the Mexicans stamp passports ‘Salió a Cuba’ in bold letters. But, of course, passports can be conveniently ‘lost,’ destroying the evidence.” Time also noted that the airlift had figured prominently in the questions and answers at President Kennedy’s press conference a week earlier.
During the summer a group of 58 students sponsored by the Fair Play for Cuba Committee defied the U.S. ban on travel to Cuba. President Kennedy publicly condemned their action, and the State Department lifted their passports when they returned. In July Edwin E. Willis, the chairman of the House Un-American Activities Committee, gave a speech in New Orleans in which he charged that many of the travelers had Communist backgrounds and had returned to this country “to lecture on the glories of Castro’s Cuba.”
At some point Oswald considered hijacking a plane to Havana. He studied airline schedules and maps, and when Marina refused to go along with the scheme, he told her he would go ahead on his own. On July 30 the Times-Picayune covered the Cuban flights from Mexico City and noted, “Any American with a valid passport and a clean criminal record can enter Cuba via Mexico without State Department authorization provided he is acceptable to Cuban authorities and aerial transportation is available.” After this—Marina thought it was in late August—Oswald burst into the apartment with the news that he had found a legal way to get to Cuba. According to McMillan, he told her, “There’s a Cuban Embassy in Mexico. I’ll go there. I’ll show them my clippings, show them how much I’ve done for Cuba, and explain how hard it is to help in America. And how above all I want to help Cuba.”
In late May Oswald’s campaign to establish his pro-Castro credentials was just beginning. He was also trying to get Marina to answer a letter she had received from the Soviet Embassy in Washington in April, asking her to state her reasons for wanting to go back to the Soviet Union. On the same weekend that Oswald wrote the Fair Play for Cuba Committee asking for a charter, Marina sent a plaintive letter to Ruth (in Russian): “… As soon as you left all ‘love’ stopped, and I am very hurt that Lee’s attitude towards me is such that I feel each minute that I bind him. He insists that I leave America, which I don’t want to do at all. I like America very much and think that even without Lee I would not be lost here. What do you think. This is the basic question which doesn’t leave me day or night.”
Without waiting for a reply from the Committee, Oswald dropped by the Jones Printing Company opposite his workplace. Using the alias “Osborne,” he ordered, for $9.89, one thousand copies of a handbill reading:
HANDS OFF CUBA!
Join the Fair Play for Cuba Committee
NEW ORLEANS CHARTER MEMBER BRANCH
Free Literature, Lectures
LOCATION:
[space left blank]
EVERYONE WELCOME!
In the meantime, Vincent T. Lee had written a cautious reply to Oswald’s requests, and sent him a membership car
d, but not the charter or application forms he had wanted. The Fair Play director said that although the Committee would like to see a New Orleans chapter opened, “It would be hard to conceive of a chapter with as few members as seem to exist in the New Orleans area.” He added, “You must realize that you will come under tremendous pressures with any attempt to do FPCC work in that area.” He told Oswald that most chapters operated semi-privately out of a home using a post office box for mailings to avoid violent opposition from “the lunatic fringe.” Vincent Lee advised against taking an office so soon, suggesting that Oswald wait and see how he could operate in the community through several public experiences first.
Oswald was, of course, not prepared to “wait and see.” On June 3 he rented Post Office Box 30061, listing his own name and that of A.J. Hidell and Marina Oswald as persons authorized to pick up mail. In addition, he gave Fair Play for Cuba as an organization receiving mail at that box. He visited another printer and ordered five hundred offset copies of a membership application form he had made up. A few days later Oswald responded to Vincent Lee and enclosed one of the handbills:
I was glad to receive your advice concerning my try at starting a New Orleans F.P.C.C. chapter. I hope you won’t be too disapproving of my innovations but I do think they are necessary for this area.
As per your advice, I have taken a P.O. Box (No. 30061).
Against your advice, I have decided to take an office from the very beginning.
[As] you see from the circular I had jumped the gun on the charter business but I don’t think it’s too important, you may think the circular is too provocative, but I want it to attract attention, even if it’s the attention of the lunatic fringe. I had 2,000 of them run off.…
In any event I will keep [you] posted, and even if the office stays open 1 month more people will find out about the F.P.C.C. than if there had never been any office at all, don’t you agree?
Please feel free to give advice and any other help.
Not surprisingly, the national director thought better of offering any more advice. Although Oswald would continue sending reports of his activities throughout the summer, hoping to get some favorable response, Vincent Lee never again wrote back.
On June 10 Oswald wrote The Worker:
…. I have formed a “Fair Play for Cuba Committee” here in New Orleans. I think it is the best way to attract the broad mass of people to a popular struggle.
I ask that you give me as much literature as you judge possible since I think it would be very nice to have your literature among the “Fair Play” leaflets (like the one enclosed) and pamphlets in my office.
Also please be so kind as to convey the enclosed “honorary membership” cards to those fighters for peace Mr. Gus Hall and Mr. B. Davis. Yours Fraternally,
The “membership cards” were evidently two copies of the forms he had printed. If the Party officials Hall or Davis happened to send even a perfunctory letter of thanks, it would look good in his résumé. They did not. (As far as the FBI could later determine, Oswald never rented an office, as he claimed.)
On June 16 an FBI informant in New York reported that Oswald had written a letter to The Worker. The information may have come from someone in the New York post office who made a note of his return address on the envelope. In any case, the information was sent to the FBI in New Orleans, which relayed it to Dallas, where agent James Hosty had recently lost track of him. In early July Hosty asked the New Orleans office to verify Oswald’s presence there. It wasn’t until August that the office confirmed Oswald’s residence in that city. Keeping track of Oswald was apparently not high on the FBI’s list of priorities, but the agency didn’t have, at this point, any reason to believe that it should be.
During the second week of June there was a drumbeat of political developments in the news. On the 11th newspapers across the country carried reports of Governor George Wallace’s flight to the University of Alabama to block the admission of a black student, and of a South Vietnamese monk who had burned himself to death to protest the anti-Buddhist policies of Premier Ngo Dinh Diem. A day later, civil rights activist Medgar Evers was killed by a right-wing sniper in Mississippi. On June 14, a front-page headline in the Times-Picayune played up a local story. It announced the arrival of the U.S. carrier Wasp at the Dumaine Street wharf, where it was greeted by state dignitaries and relatives of the 2800 officers and men on board. The accompanying story also mentioned that the Wasp’s planes had provided aerial reconnaissance during the October naval blockade of Cuba.
This news gave Oswald an idea. That weekend he appeared at the Dumaine Street dock and began handing out his “Hands Off Cuba” handbills and a Fair Play pamphlet called “The Truth About Cuba is in Cuba.” One of the enlisted men he solicited complained to a patrolman, who approached Oswald and told him he needed a permit and would have to leave or be arrested. Oswald argued strenuously, but he left.
During this period Oswald was still greasing and oiling machinery at Reily’s coffee company. It was the sort of dirty manual work he hated. A fellow worker named LeBlanc remembered that Oswald approached him one day on the job:
… and I asked him, I says, “Are you finished all your greasing?” He said yes. So he asked me …“Well, can I help you?” I said, “No, what I am doing I don’t need no help.” So he stood there a few minutes, and all of a sudden he said, “You like it here?” I says, “Well, sure I like it here. I have been here a long time, about 8½ years or so.” He says, “Oh, hell, I don’t mean this place.” I said, “Well, what do you mean?” He says, “This damn country.” I said, “Why, certainly, I love it. After all, this is my country.” He turned around and walked off.
Oswald spent a large portion of his work time at the Crescent City Garage next door looking at gun magazines in their waiting area. The garage owner later said they had talked about rifles—trajectory and feet per second and the supposed deadliness of a small-caliber bullet.
On June 24 Oswald applied for a new passport in New Orleans and was routinely issued one the next day.1 Later that week Marina noticed that he seemed depressed. He stole a glance in her direction, then put aside something he was writing and went into the kitchen. She found him seated on a chair in the dark, his head down. When she embraced him, he began to sob. He told her he was lost and didn’t know what to do, and then asked, “Would you like me to come to Russia, too?” Marina was delighted. He held her by the shoulders and told her to write the Soviet Embassy and say he would be coming back with her. He said he would add his own request to her letter. That weekend he helped her compose her second letter to the embassy. This time she requested visas for the entire family, explaining that she was homesick and her husband was frequently unemployed. (“More tears and fewer facts,” Oswald directed.)
Marina didn’t discover until she was questioned by the Warren Commission that before Lee mailed her letter, he had included the following note.
Dear Sirs:
Please rush the entrance visa for the return of Soviet citizen, Marina N. Oswald.
She is going to have a baby in October, therefore you must grant the entrance visa and make the the transportation arrangements before then.
As for my return entrance visa please consider it separately.
His major concern was the same as before—to get Marina and June back to Russia.
For the past few weeks Ruth Paine had been considering Marina’s predicament, and on July 11 she wrote to tell her friend that if Lee insisted she go back to Russia alone, she could come and live with her instead. They both had small children, and Marina could keep her company now that Michael had moved out, and help her improve her Russian. Later Ruth wrote that she would be making a trip east and would stop by for a visit around September 18. Ruth’s offer would fit neatly into Oswald’s plans.
Because of his general lack of interest, the William B. Reily Company fired him on July 19. Oswald again signed up for unemployment benefits from Texas. He now had more time for reading. Amon
g the library books he read that summer were a biography of John Kennedy, a book on communism by J. Edgar Hoover, Russia Under Khruschev, Brave New World, The Huey Long Murder Case, and four James Bond spy novels. The first book he had checked out was Portrait of a Revolutionary: Mao Tse-tung. He was also subscribing to some Russian magazines (including Agitator, a Party manual on the techniques of propaganda and agitation), as well as The Worker, The Militant, and Time.
In July Oswald’s cousin Gene Murret, who was studying to become a priest at a Jesuit college in Mobile, Alabama, invited Oswald to come to the college to give a talk on his experiences in the Soviet Union. The Murrets drove the Oswalds to Mobile, and by all accounts, Oswald handled himself well. His audience of students and faculty had expected to hear a man who had been disillusioned by Soviet communism. Instead, Oswald implied that he was disappointed in Russia only because the full principles of Marxism weren’t being lived up to. He criticized capitalism, claiming its foundation was based on the exploitation of the poor. Perhaps to draw a laugh, he said, “Capitalism doesn’t work, communism doesn’t work. In the middle is socialism, and that doesn’t work either.” Yet he told them he still believed in the Marxist ideals. During the question and answer session, Oswald seemed reluctant to discuss religion with the Jesuit students, but when one asked what atheism in Russia does to morality, he answered, “No matter whether people believe in God or not, they will do what they want.…”
While Charles Murret and his son attended Oswald’s all-male lecture, Robert J. Fitzpatrick, a student who spoke Russian, showed Marina and Lillian around the seminary grounds. It had been several months since Marina had been able to converse with anyone except Lee in her native tongue, and her remarks to Fitzpatrick were more revealing than anything her husband had to say to his audience. She told him that she liked the United States, but that at least in Russia people had no difficulty making a living. Then she told him about Lee’s troubles. He was out of work and they were having financial problems. He did a lot of haphazard reading. She told him her husband was away from home a great deal and she did not know any of his associates or any of his activities. She said she had no opportunity to learn English because Oswald kept her away from other people. Fitzpatrick thought she appeared to be happy with Oswald, but that he “was definitely the head of the family.”
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