Mitchell Hearns Bishop | Howard Besser's IS 208 | Information Studies, UCLA

 

 

Once when I was planning a trip to Barcelona, a friend of mine's husband tried to talk me into smuggling Cuban cigars back into the country for him.

He wanted me to front about a thousand dollars, at any rate, he wasn't offering me money. I was supposed to go to a store in Barcelona and buy certain brands and take them back. The argument was that the worst case scenario thing that could happen to me was that I would lose the cigars and the money. At the time, the idea did not appeal to me. I suppose I could have made a great deal of money if I pulled it off but I prudishly felt like someone was soliciting me to committ a crime. I used to enjoy the occasional cigar and the one time I did smoke a Cuban cigar in London, it was excellent. The whole thing seems to ridiculous, so petulant on the part of the U.S. After all these years the whole thing seems absurd really. The ban on the import of Cuban cigars, and other products for that matter, took on an even greater level of absurdity recently when visiting German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder gave Bill Clinton a box of Cuban cigars as a gift. Obviously somebody didn't do their homework.

 

Mitchell Hearns Bishop | Howard Besser's IS 208 | Information Studies, UCLA