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COYOTE: The lure of a fine Cuban cigar 

In Havana, as celebrity bait at an event called the International Festival of Tobacco. Despite the fact that I no longer smoke cigars, they once played a marked role in my life, and that's enough of a thread to take advantage of the opportunity to see Havana. . . .

It was Jack who initiated my father into the pleasures and expenses of Cuban cigars. When he died, he left my father the humidor (about the size of a large washing machine) and many of his finest cigars. When my father died, I inherited the humidor, which I still own. When I was about 12, my father caught me smoking a Pall Mall behind the house, and in his inimitable way, suggested that if I was going to smoke, I damn well ought to smoke "the best," and gave me a small Panatela of some kind, which, despite making me green and ill, I quite liked.

When trouble began between Castro and the United States, my father (like President Kennedy) determined that it might crimp his enjoyment of Cuban cigars, so he began buying about 100 boxes a week and storing them in the vault at Dunhill. . . .

Ten years later, I had the money to buy my own cigars, and my work in the movies afforded me frequent travel abroad. Jack's cigar broker, then my father's, was the venerable firm of James Fox on London's elegant St. James Street. For a number of years, before America became obsessed and vicious about destroying the Cuban economy, they would remove the labels and ship me my Bolivars and Monte Cristos in Jamaican boxes . . .

Alas, other vices from my past caught up with me, and I was forced to stop smoking and drinking, and gave away my last stash of cigars to friends. However, my familiarity with the subject, my revolutionary and Socialist sentiments, and my desire to see Cuba first hand, led me to accept this all-expenses-paid plus car-and-driver and rooms in the famous old Nacional Hotel of Al Capone and Meyer Lansky fame. I would, if required, cut ribbons and be the George Hamilton of Havana. So, I'm off to look around and see what can be learned. Stay tuned.

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