As a genuine symbol of national identity, tobacco is heritage to all people born on this island. The recognition of a long history that saw the light of day in times of the Spanish conquest and colonial rule, ties this leaf to key moments in the collective memory of the Cubans.

“Tobacco was the Indian’s bosom friend. From his birth to his demise, the Indian was shrouded by the spirals of tobacco,” was the definition made by Don Fernando Ortiz, a scholar who pried into the soul of the Cuban people, to highlight the place this crop took in the lifestyle of those original islanders. A similar version was made by the astounded crew that accompanied Christopher Columbus during his American adventure on November 1492: “These Christians found many people on their way, men and women with firebrands in their hands and certain aromatic herbs, dry herbs stuffed inside a certain kind of leaf, dry too, like a musket made of paper…”

Registered in the General History of the Indies, this recount made by Fray Bartolome de las Casas went down in history as one of the first news reports about the enigmatic leaf. From that moment on, and construed as the basis of the aboriginal way of living, tobacco has been a symbol of our country’s culture and national identity.

“Don’t tell me the history of tobacco,” goes an old saying that many generations of Cubans have turned to and clearly reflects how long the history of the aromatic leaf actually is. Even though the Arawack culture, on its way through the Americas and the Caribbean, brought tobacco to his island nation, it was Cuba that put the plant on the map in the 15th century and since then the planet has learned about its quality, usage and manufacture.

Don Ortiz delved into this longstanding process and labeled it as part of a term he coined as transculturalization, a concept that explains away how the crop passed on from aboriginal hands to Spaniards and on to African Negroes. That’s how it began to be used, traded, smuggled and consumed in so many ways –powder, quid, rolled, ground and in rolls- getting two enthusiastic thumbs up, and down, on each and every occasion. And all forms of tobacco consumption have begotten an assortment of accessories and utensils made of different materials, depending on preferences and affordability.

In 1717, the King of Spain tried to halt the underground trade of tobacco that enemy nations of the Spanish Crown were conducting, so he enacted the Edict of Warehouse. The law hit hard the finances of all tobacco planters, peasants who used to grow the aromatic leaves, as Jose Marti once put it, “with their pious hands under the sweltering sun, by the raking man, the cutter, all trapped in moist putrefaction.” Tobacco growers staged staunch protests against the King’s edict in a number of occasions between 1717 and 1723, eventually giving way to a massive rebellion that was brutally cracked down by Spanish authorities and ended up in the hanging of a dozen plotters. This historic development is penciled in as the first act of national rebelliousness against the colonial rule.

Even though tobacco trade bogged down dramatically, its production never stopped, though it took a slow burn for a number of years. In 1796, people on the island learned about the first cigar factory, owned by Francisco Cabañas, in which workers were rolling stogies by hand. Lots of other factories popped up all across the island during the 19th century, many of them lodged in private homes, military barracks, prisons and similar places. Each and every one of them began making rings of their own to tell their brands apart, let alone marked differences in size, width and leaves.

This century witnessed a long list of major developments that played a distinctive role in the growth of Cuba’s tobacco industry. The royal edict that unlocked the trade ban on tobacco was proclaimed in 1817, thus marking the beginning of a commercial boom that reached out to many parts of the world other than Spain, until then the natural consumer and spreader of the Cuban product. The opening of the British market in the 1830s was so sensational that a special cigar ring called London was made.

There came the time of the huge cigar factories and big-time brands, like Romeo & Juliet, Partagas, Hoyo de Monterrey and Montecristo, just to name but a few. All these brands started glutting the world market and giving themselves a good name thanks to their undisputed quality.

Registered in 1840 by a German man called Stockmann and bought later on by Asturian merchant Manuel Lopez, Punch is one of the oldest brands in the cigar-making industry. Partagas, initially in the hands of Catalonian Jaime Partagas Rabell, has stormed the world market ever since as one of the premier trademarks. Its headquarters, housed since 1845 in a majestic building on Havana’s Industria Street, was called the Royal Cigar Factory, making cigars and rings that continue to be the top choice of smokers from around the world. Hoyo de Monterrey (1865), founded by Jose Gener y Batet, paid tribute to the tobacco grown in Pinar del Rio’s San Juan y Martinez.

Bought by Inocencio Alvarez and Jose “Manin” Garcia Romero, Romeo & Juliet has displayed for 130 years, like the love story written by William Shakespeare, an array of cigars and rings highly coveted and sought after by aficionados of the ultimate smoke under the sun. Last but not least, Montecristo (1935), founded by Alonso Menendez and using a fleur-de-lis logo, rekindled this magnificent and universal novel with the launch of the fanciest cigars money can buy.

As a result of this industrial upswing, the number of tobacco planters and cigar hand rollers leapfrogged to new record highs on the island nation. In 1865, the El Figaro and Partagas factories introduced book and newspapers readers, a practice that turned this sector into the most cultivated and politically motivated guild in the entire country. Those times were also marked by the working class’s anarchical struggles for higher wages and better working conditions. Despite fierce opposition to newspaper reading in cigar factories, the idea spread out to other factories across the country and has endured the test of time.

The period between 1868 and 1898 brought along the biggest financial, political and spiritual support on the part of tobacco planters and cigar makers to the independence of Cuba. Guild members who migrated to the U.S. and settled down in Tampa and Key West were head over heels committed to the Cuban Revolutionary Party founded by Jose Marti in 1892. The party was joined by the likes of Juan Maria Reyes, Jose Dolores Poyo, Eduardo Hidalgo-Gato, Carlos Baliño and many other men and women closely linked to the industry. And let’s not forget the key role played by tobacco in the 1895 general rebellion when the order to launch the revolt was sent, wrapped inside a cigar, to Juan Gualberto Gomez.

No wonder, then, that the first strikes following the inauguration of the Republican era on May 20, 1902, were headed by workers from the cigar-making industry. The Strike of the Apprentices (1903), the Strike of Currency (1906) and the social struggle against the mechanization of the tobacco industry in 1925 are just a few cases in point.

For centuries, Habano and its industry have taken a front seat in Cuba’s economic and social development, not to mention their huge contributions to whipping the island nation’s culture and identity into shape. After the triumph of the 1959 Revolution, a new breed of brands and rings has been created by our industry workers, sticking to a legacy of international recognition that prevails today. Cohiba, the best-known of those newcomers, goes hand in hand with Trinidad, Cuaba, Vegueros, Vegas Robaina, San Cristobal de La Habana, and more recently, Guantanamera. All of them have helped Cuba be the country of the perfect trilogy: soil, sun and skillful hands, a combination that has made Habano the world’s unrivaled king of cigars.