The President's Last-Minute Cigar Run

One evening in early February 1962, President Kennedy called his press secretary, Pierre Salinger, into the Oval Office with an unusual assignment: he needed about a thousand H. Upmann Petit Coronas, his preferred small Cuban cigar, by the following morning.

Salinger, a cigar man himself, worked the phones overnight. By morning he had more than 1,200. Only then, the story goes, did Kennedy sign the paperwork extending the trade embargo against Cuba. Proclamation 3447 was dated February 3, 1962 and took effect February 7, banning Cuban goods, cigars included, from the American market.

How true is it? The John F. Kennedy Presidential Library confirms that Petit Upmanns were indeed among the president's preferred cigars. But archivists have found no record proving or disproving the midnight shopping spree; the story rests entirely on Salinger's own later telling.

That is precisely why lounges love it. It is the embargo in miniature: a president who adored Cuban tobacco, cutting off the supply for everyone but making one final, very human exception for himself. Sixty years on, the embargo remains, and so does the story, both apparently permanent.