Sometimes a cigar isn't just a cigar.

Take, for example, the Romeo y Julieta No 2 in the glass case before me. I'm standing in the cigar bar at Beijing's St. Regis Hotel, and if I reach out and slide the glass panel, I am on my way to committing a crime. No, I am not planning to steal that premium smoke.

But, as an American, if I were to purchase that cigar, I would violate the embargo on Cuban goods signed by former US president John F. Kennedy in 1962.

I was 7 years old then, and the world was a very different place. It was the height of the Cold War, and the Bay of Pigs invasion was a recent disaster of Kennedy's foreign policy. Most adult Americans were all for the embargo - though if Kennedy had lived in the Internet age, somebody might have leaked a dirty little secret: The president had his press secretary go out and buy more than 1,000 Petit Upmann cigars the day before he signed the law making the sale of all things Cuban illegal in the US.

More than that, the Cuban Assets Control Regulations "prohibit any person subject to US jurisdiction from dealing in any property in which Cuba or a Cuban national has or has had any interest".

The current bulletin from the US Treasury Department, which enforces the embargo, pointedly notes that US citizens cannot purchase cigars in nearby Mexico.

The message for me, a US expat living and working in China for the past five years: Step away from that cigar case and its lovely aroma.

Many Americans who live and travel abroad, I suspect, don't imagine they are lawbreakers when they buy Cuban goodies that are legally sold in China and elsewhere. I've even wondered if US Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew, who was recently in China, avoided the temptation of an after-dinner Romeo y Julieta No 2. His agency, of course, is the enforcer of the embargo.