Conejo Valley Days Parade Photo From 1963 Captures Relations with Cuba at the Time
Here's a throwback photo from the 1963 Conejo Valley Days Parade in what the following year would officially become the City of Thousand Oaks. An entry with "Care Package for Castro" with a missile with the caption "Y's Men" (which I suspect is in reference to the Y's Men, a service group that helped construct the original Conejo Valley YMCA building in 1964).
Just months prior, in October 1962, was the Cuban Missile Crisis, the confrontation between the United States and Soviet Union over the placement of Soviet nuclear missiles in Cuba. After intense negotiations between President Kennedy and Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, the Soviets agreed to remove the weapons in Cuba in exchange for public declaration that the U.S. would not invade Cuba.
My how times have changed since then, with the United States in process of re-establishing diplomatic relations with Cuba.