The Cuban cigar crisis
QUESTION Did JFK circumvent his own trade embargo on Cuban cigars?
PRESIDENT John F. Kennedy asked an aide to buy him a stash of Cuban cigars just before he authorised the February 1962 U.S. trade embargo that made such cigars illegal.
The presidential decree cited ‘ the subversive offensive of Sino- Soviet communism with which the government of Cuba is publicly aligned’.
However, the night before it was signed, JFK asked his head of Press and fellow cigar smoker Pierre Salinger to obtain 1,000 Petit Upmann cigars for him.
H. Upmann, one of Cuba’s finest cigar brands, is named after German banker Herman Upmann, who moved to the island because of his love for cigars.
As Salinger told Cigar Aficionado magazine, the morning after JFK’s request, he went to see him: ‘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 embargo took place at the height of the Cold War, a year after the failed CIAbacked 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.
Subsequently, the President became more cagey about contraband cigars. In May 1962, Salinger met the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev who, knowing JFK’s penchant for Cuban cigars, gave him a wooden box of 250 to pass on.
This was not well received. Worried about the political fallout if the gift were discovered by the Press, JFK ordered Salinger to hand over the cigars to his chief of customs, who had them destroyed.
Paul Price, Southampton. THERE are at least 14 different types of speed camera in use on UK roads. Some calculate speed at the instant the car passes in front of them and others calculate speed over a fixed distance.
Most fixed- speed cameras use radar technology. A radar pulse is transmitted outwards. When it hits a solid object, such as a car, the pulse will be reflected back to its source.
The time taken for the pulse to make the round trip is calculated in microseconds, and that allows the distance from the source to be calculated.
The next pulse repeats this procedure, and because the target has moved in between, the time taken for the pulse to return will be shorter or longer. By measuring the time difference, the speed of the car 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 5 mph.
For example, in a 30 mph speed limit, if the car is travelling at less than 35 mph, it will not cross a white line between the taking of the first picture and the second. If it is travelling at 35 mph 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 mph and 34 mph, even though they have exceeded the speed limit.
Gatso cameras photograph the rear of the car, so the camera’s flash doesn’t dazzle the driver.
Bob Cubitt, Northampton.
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 the word summit to diplomacy is not clear. Perhaps it was inspired by the increasing use of the term in British newspapers as expeditions to scale Mount Everest resumed after World War II. Everest was finally conquered on May 29, 1953.
Cartoonists of the time and later loved to depict world leaders eyeing a peak or perched uncomfortably on it.
Joseph Byron, Melton Mowbray, Leics.
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