Caviar-cigar capitalism

Your analysis of the Caribbean cigar business (Cuba’s communists and exiles ready for great cigar smoke-off, June 14) recalls the irony of the 20th century’s Cold War that was the least remarked on.

Throughout the global ideological polarisation between western capitalism and Soviet socialism, the two consumer products most symbolic of western capitalist excess and expensively conspicuous consumption were … Russian caviar and Cuban cigars.

There has to be a moral in there somewhere, but I’m not quite sure what it is exactly.

David Chaplin Fish Hoek