Time flies and we barely notice how fast hours are ticking by. It feels so good to chat with this jaunty, glad, humble and smart man with a gift of the gab, who oozes life galore and has officially signed up on the 120 Years Club, as if he were trying to stress we’re going to have “Robaina cigars for a mighty long time.”

Optimism, coupled with an open-minded and forthright look, mark this peasant who was born in Alquizar, in the province of Havana, but considers himself a full-fledged resident of San Luis, in Pinar del Rio, where he’s spent most of his life.

Fond of roosters, baseball, boxing and aerobic workouts, Mr. Robaina has done nothing –as he himself said it- but grow tobacco all of his life. The fact that he’s penciled in as the world’s best tobacco grower is precisely for a valuable secret that Robaina boils down to this: “Land has always been my life. The great love I feel for these soils, coupled with the experience both my grandpa and my father passed on to me, my own experience, the consciousness that I have a treasure in these lands that were given to me and my duty was to cultivate them with love and tenderness, is the big secret that has made me and my family taken tobacco growing to the ultimate level and outside the national boundaries.”

Even though Alejandro Robaina sums up this assertion of what he believes is his greatest secret, he’s also a superb connoisseur of key aspects and techniques that have a lot to do with sowing tobacco seeds and harvesting the leaves: tobacco varieties, today’s drying techniques and a whole lot more. For instance, he grows a variety of tobacco labeled as Corojo 98. On the other hand, he always grows black tobacco because he thinks it’s much heftier than the milder short-stem tobacco. And he can talk forever about the influence of moon phases and their connection with growing and harvest seasons. “You must sow the seeds under a crescent moon and pick up the leaves in waning moon. I always start sowing on October 28 because the leaves you collect in January are the best. No other month gives tobacco leaves better texture and color than January.” He’s also an expert when it comes to traditional drying techniques and today’s high-tech methods, like lime-based drying that, he says, can produce 85 percent more layers as long as the harvest is well done.

Today, Robaina cigars make the rounds in eighty or one hundred countries, with highlights in Malaysia, Israel, Lebanon and Egypt’s Cairo. Indeed, they have stormed the world market and stamped their high-quality seal for the very pride of Cuba.