Many a major achievement of Cuba’s culture is owed to tobacco, an element that has inspired an assortment of artistic manifestations in the course of time.

The cigar-making industry and its workers have through the years played an outstanding role in the advance of Cuba’s cultural values. Even though literature and music are by far our two chief cultural assets, it must be said that both of them have been closely tied to tobacco since the early period of the colonial rule. Spanish colonizers learned the art of growing tobacco, rolling leaves and smoking cigars from Cuba’s aboriginal islanders. Those men picked up the expertise and passed it on to their offspring, a trade and a habit that are deeply rooted in the collective memory of the Cuban people.

Nonetheless, the presentation of cigars for the then fledgling Spanish market finally shaped up in the late 18th century, reaching its apex in the mid 19th century. The new designs featured better boxes and cases and paid closer attention to both the size and shape of all cigars. That was the time when cigar rings first showed up. We must bear in mind the one-hundred-year span between 1717 to 1817 was a period when tobacco trade with other countries bogged down, thus prompting longstanding neglect toward the presentation of stogies. But in the 1830s, a few brands and their rings put themselves on the map, especially the ones that eventually glutted the British market and were proudly showcased in London.

A decade later, in the 1840s, printing presses started making one-tint lithographed labels over sheets of hued paper in an effort to establish the identity of each and every cigar brand. That could be construed as the first attempt to fight off fakery and bogus stogies that were already trying to muscle their way through the real McCoy, let alone the possibility of making lovely presentations for the coveted products. The creation of boxes and cases for shipping Habanos followed shortly after that, especially those made of cedar wood that prevented the delicious aroma from leaking out.

Let’s keep in mind that in the 1830s, when Cuban Habanos began to storm the European market, those boxes and cases used to be sealed off with scotch tape (replaced later on by filets) for the same purpose of keeping the scent in the container. The worker who used to do that job was called scotch tape sealer (filet maker a tad later) and also started decorating boxes and cases on a regular basis.

In the first half of the 19th century, a man named Rojas had begun to make gorgeous cases of precious wood as superb as the cigars they contained. In the pinnacle of his career, Mr. Rojas made boxes for the Baron of Rothchildt and other members of the European royalty, an instance that speaks volumes of his fame as an artisan.

By the end of the 1850s, Spanish Queen Elizabeth II requested information from Cuba’s Economy Secretary to be relayed to his colleague in the Philippines about the beautiful decoration of Cuban cigars that had started using lace and plaited paper at that time, some of them printed in France, with a view to sell around the world like other brand of hand-rolled cigar has ever done.

Frenchmen, Spaniards and Germans were the first artists who used black-and-white lithography (1840). Shortly after, in 1860, Cuban cigars rolled at La Honradez factory, owned by the Susini family, turned the trade around when it imported chromolithographic machines from France to make a variety of wrappings and labels for the cigar-making industry on the island nation. As soon as the new printing method entered Cuba, local apprentices got the hang of it and started churning out the most beautiful decorated labels out of the stones.

In the late 19th century, the More brothers from Asturias took up the decoration of cigar boxes and cases a peg higher with the introduction of metal chromolithography, thus giving rise to the beginning of a new kind of container.

With the help of powder, Habanos and other spin-offs, and later on with cigarettes, we’re now stealing a peek into the creation of accessories exclusively made for smokers. We’re referring to a long list of utensils made in a multitude of shapes and from different materials by smokers themselves (both men and women) and by an army of passionate artisans with a flair for this kind of business.

Let’s not forget the comfy campechana chair (named after Mexico’s Campeche), recreated by wood artists, where our ancestors used to lay back to puff at an exquisite cigar, nor the amazing shelves and showcases made of precious wood that were used to display stogies that factories once dispatched to a number of events on the turf and overseas. Countless gold, silver and bronze medals grabbed by Cuba’s ultimate product in those international and national fairs were popping up in a piecemeal fashion on both sides of several rings and labels as tokens of our brands’ national identity.

Cuban tobacco, its harvest and making, have dramatically enriched the country’s lexicon from the dawn of the colonial rule to date, coining words for each and every era. Terms like gavilla, tercio, cogollo, desbotonar, paca, deshijar, mancuerna, secadero and casa de curar, among many others, are still heard in the plantations. But the industry does not lag behind either, providing a bevy of words of its own like escogida, despalillo, torcido, brevas, panetelas, cazadores, corona, londres, as well as anillado, envasado and fileteado. As far as design and printing are concerned, we hear the likes of envolturas, vistas, bofeton, tapaclavos, papeletas and many others used in the process of sprucing up boxes and cases before they are ready to hit the market.

In today’s world, wood craftsmen and fabric makers, silversmiths and goldsmiths, painters and woodcarvers, metal carvers, ceramic artists, architects, writers, musicians, photographers, fine artists, movie stars and celebrities find a rich source of inspiration in this product collected on Cuban soil. Both the harvest and industrial process of tobacco and its byproducts have no doubt made huge contributions of their own to the broad range of Cuba’s cultural values.