The Cuban cigar crisis
QUESTION Did JFK circumvent his own trade embargo on Cuban cigars?
NOT exactly. What President John F. Kennedy did do was ask an aide to buy him a stash of Cuban cigars just hours before he authorised the US trade embargo — which subsequently made them illegal.
JFK asked his head of press and fellow cigar smoker Pierre Salinger to obtain ‘1,000 Petit Upmanns’ on February 6, 1962. H. Upmann is one of Cuba’s finest cigar brands; named after a German banker, Herman Upmann, who moved to Cuba because of his love for Cuban cigars.
The following morning Salinger returned with 1,200 cigars. As he told Cigar Aficionado magazine: ‘In fact, I’d gotten 1,200 cigars. Kennedy smiled, and opened up his desk. He took out a long paper which he immediately signed. It was the decree banning all Cuban products from the United States. Cuban cigars were now illegal in our country.’
The decree announcing the embargo on cigars was signed on February 3, 1962, citing ‘the subversive offensive of Sino-Soviet communism with which the government of Cuba is publicly aligned’.
It went into effect four days later at the height of the Cold War, a year after the failed CIA-backed Bay of Pigs invasion meant to oust communism from Cuba, and eight months before Soviet attempts to put nuclear missiles on the island brought the two superpowers to the brink of war.
It was the beginning of a comprehensive ban on US trade with the island. Subsequently, JFK became more cagey about securing the contraband.
In May 1962, Salinger met Nikita Khrushchev who, knowing JFK’s penchant for Cuban cigars, gave him a wooden box of 250 cigars for the President. This was not so well received. Worried about the political fallout if the gift was discovered by the press, JFK ordered Salinger to hand them over to his chief of customs, who had them destroyed. Paul Price, Southampton.
QUESTION Does searing meat really seal in the juice?
THE idea that searing meat seals in the juices has been debunked, though it can improve its taste.
The seeds of the myth were sown early. In Aristotle’s Meteorology, which dates to the 4th century BC, he wrote: ‘Thus as the exterior pores contract, the moisture contained in the object cannot escape any more, but is imprisoned there when the pores close.’
This theory was given a scientific boost by 19th century German chemist Justus von Liebig. In Researches On The Chemistry Of Food in 1847, he stated that searing created a ‘crust’ on the surface of the meat, which would keep juices in.
His conclusions were supported by the famous French chef and culinary author Auguste Escoffier, who repeated Liebig’s results in 1902’s Guide Culinaire.
In 1930, a controlled study at the University of Missouri showed that beef rib roasts seared at a high temperature and then cooked only until they were rare lost a little more fluid than roasts cooked in a constant oven.
Harold McGee, in his 1990 book The Curious Cook, describes several experiments proving increased juice loss in seared meat.
None of this is to say you shouldn’t sear meat. It serves the important purpose of building flavour and texture. A hot pan can create a golden, caramelised crust. Mary Blyth, Berwick-upon-Tweed, Northumberland.
QUESTION Which was the first meeting to be styled a ‘summit conference’?
THE term ‘summit’ was coined by Winston Churchill. Speaking in Edinburgh on February 14, 1950, at the start of the Cold War, he proposed ‘another talk with the Soviet Union at the highest level’, adding that it was not ‘easy to see how matters could be worsened by parley at the summit’. Three years later, on May 11, 1953, he called again for ‘a conference on the highest level’, for a will to win peace ‘at the summit of the nations’.
What prompted Churchill to apply ‘summit’ to diplomacy is not clear. Obviously it is an allusion to a meeting at the highest levels of government, no doubt reinforced by the increasing usage in British newspapers as expeditions to scale Mount Everest, the world’s highest peak, resumed after World War II.
Everest was finally conquered on May 29, 1953. Public fascination with it explained why Churchill’s figure of speech captured the public imagination. Cartoonists of the period and beyond loved to depict world leaders eyeing a peak or perched uncomfortably at its top. Joseph Byron, Melton Mowbray, Leics.
QUESTION What sort of technology is used in speed cameras and how accurate is it?
SPEED cameras can generally be broken down into those that calculate speed at the instant the car passes in front of them and those that calculate speed over a fixed distance.
The majority of fixed speed cameras use radar technology. A radar pulse is transmitted outwards. When it hits a solid object the pulse will be reflected back to its source. The time taken for the pulse to make the round trip is calculated, usually in microseconds, and that allows the distance from the source to be calculated.
The next pulse repeats this procedure, but because the target has moved in between pulses, the time taken for the pulse to return will be either shorter or longer.
By calculating the time difference between the two returns, the speed of the target can be calculated.
The Gatso camera uses a series of painted white lines on the road. Every white line crossed between the first picture and the second picture represents a speed difference of 5mph (8km/h).
For example, in a 30mph speed limit if the car is travelling at less than 35mph it will not cross a white line between the taking of the first picture and the second. If it is travelling at 35mph or more it will cross one of the white lines. The images are subjected to physical checking to confirm this. For this reason drivers are rarely prosecuted for travelling at speeds between 31 and 34mph, even though they have exceeded the speed limit. Bob Cubitt, Northampton.
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