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Michigan’s “restricted” list includes Leonard’s thriller “Cuba Libre,” set right before the 1898 Spanish-American War, and Frederick Forsyth’s “The Day of the Jackal,” about a professional assassin’s attempt to murder French President Charles de Gaulle in the 1960s.

Just as Petzold didn’t realize how funny “Afire” was until his actors showed him, he also wasn’t fully cognizant that Leon’s pathetic attempts to present himself as a serious artiste were, really, a unconscious plumbing of Petzold’s own early career struggles, when he followed up his well-received debut with a strained dud, 1996’s “Cuba Libre.”

A group of American soldiers at the bar is inspired to order the same, and that thirsty unnamed captain then raises his glass to his new Cuban allies and, by way of a toast, calls out, “Por Cuba Libre!”

There is no real difference between a Cuba Libre and a rum and Coke with a lime wedge in it, except the Cuba Libre is usually made with gold rum and perhaps a little more lime than the average bar slice provides.

But a classic drink is sometimes more than a sum of its parts, and the Cuba Libre brings to mind everything romantic that we love to imagine about Cuba — the vintage cars, the mambo, the scent of cigars and Papa Hemingway sitting on a breezy portal mopping 80-proof sweat off his brow.