I'm sure I'm exaggerating the number, but aren't there several times when Columbo is offered or shown cigars, then asked not to tell his superiors that they're Cuban? I know it happens in SHORT FUSE, but I think it happens in a few other episodes.
I just watched BY DAWN'S EARLY LIGHT again, and it came as no surprise that Colonel Rumford didn't say that, considering!

It happened in Identity Crisis too.

"The Bay of Pigs wasn't a total disaster.":sleuth_or_spy:

Were they Cubans in MIND OVER MAYHEM?

I think Jose Ferrer was Cuban (or was it Mel Ferrer?), so that would be kind of fitting.

Proving once again that everything can be explained by a Seinfeld episode. :smile:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z2GdrJQCrfw

As it turns out, MeTV in the US just aired "Mind over Mayhem" and Jose Ferrer did indeed 'fess up to the cigars being Cuban. About halfway through.

"I have a friend bring them over."

Clifford Calvert pleads the 5th over the source of his cigars in Trace of Murder when Columbo asks if they are Cuban.

There's a very underrated TV movie from 1971 called "A Step Out Of Line," where Peter Falk plays a "solid citizen" who ends up planning a burglary. He's SUCH a solid citizen at the beginning that he scolds his business partner for smoking Cuban cigars (even though it's a law that probably a whole lot of the country has always ignored). I can never hear one of those COLUMBO lines without thinking of that.

I was really into cigars in my younger years and it was extremely difficult to get Cubans. Many were fake. Whenever I traveled I would only buy them from the Casa Habana, the official cigar store of the Cuban government.

Politics aside, I think that the Cuban cigars are overrated. I find Dominican cigars to be far more consistent. In fact, I often would fool friends who asked for a Cuban cigar (I had been down there twice for humanitarian aid so I had four boxes of them). I would sometimes switch the label and give them a Dominican cigar and everyone would marvel at how good it was.

Now after that long rambling post, my only point was that I doubt it was that easy to routinely get dozens of boxes of Cuban cigars in the U.S. like they did in Short Fuse. Unless of course back in the 70's things were different.