JFK and the 1,200 Upmanns

The story has only one witness — but that witness sat in the front row. Pierre Salinger, press secretary to John F. Kennedy, told it in 1992 in the magazine Cigar Aficionado as follows: one February evening in 1962, the President called him in and asked an unusual favour — to procure around a thousand “Petit Upmanns” by the following morning: small Petit Coronas of the H. Upmann brand and Kennedy’s declared favourite cigar. Salinger rang his way through Washington’s cigar shops and reported back in the morning: 1,200 pieces. Kennedy smiled, drew a document from the drawer and signed it — the executive order ending trade with Cuba. From that moment on, Habanos were forbidden goods in the United States. The President had made provision.

What is there to it? The anecdote rests solely on Salinger’s own account. The archives confirm Kennedy’s fondness for Cuban cigars but neither corroborate nor refute the nocturnal bulk purchase. What is on the record is only the sober chronology: Kennedy signed Proclamation 3447 on 3 February 1962, and the embargo took effect on 7 February — Salinger’s account compresses these days into a single, perfectly constructed scene. He himself never wavered from his version.

Whether literally true or sharpened in hindsight: the story survives because it captures a larger truth. The embargo, conceived as a short-term Cold War measure, persists in its essentials to the present day — and still separates the world’s largest cigar market from the most famous cigar island. Kennedy apparently sensed that supply would become difficult. In that he was right, as few others were.