Tobacco is the result of a thorough craftsmanship process that ends with the presentation of lithographic markings used to spruce up both boxes and cases.

Cigar brands have traveled around the world for centuries. Today, more than forty different trademarks are registered in the logbooks, yet as many as 600 brands have seen the light of day through the history of hand-rolled stogies. In 1831, the workshop in Havana’s Lealtad Street printed out the first drawings used to wrap cigars, and a few years later the first cedar boxes decorated with one-tint lithograph markings hit the market.

In the mid 19th century, over 250 different brands vied for a piece of the market with increasingly complex decorations. Some makers used to patent a number of brands and sell them out untried, even giving them monikers that cashed in on the popularity of other trademarks, like El Ciervo and El Ciervo de Oro. This practice gave rise to countless lawsuits and litigations. A legislation passed in 1870 served to tidy up the approval of licenses, and splendid full-color lithographic designs were began to be all the rage, featuring gilt bas-relieves that were gradually being copycatted by other factories around the world.

Lithography as an industry hit a high note as loud as tobacco’s. The making of boxes, cases and rings soon began to show off four different designs. Two of them –hierro and contraseña- were untouchable markings meant to be used on the outer sides, while vista and bofeton, glued as thin layers on the inner sides of the cases, were supposed to dazzle smokers as soon as they opened the boxes.

Motifs, typical scenery, landscapes, celebrities, literary characters, political developments, buildings, a variety of female faces framed in tropical, sometimes exotic scenes, were stamped on boxes and cases alike. Cigar brands gave way to a special mythology that incorporated characters from different cultures and historic contexts, even recreating the imagination with the sole purpose of pleasing a cosmopolitan clientele.

As a token of this bond between cigar making and box designs, we reproduce two pairs of beautiful lithographic works of a vista and a bofeton that belong to researcher Zoila Lapique’s personal collection.

In 1886, Jose de la Sala Muñiz requested authorization to stamp drawings of Cuban women in a natural environment to be used for his Rosas de Vuelta Abajo brand. Decoration intends to capture the autochthonous spirit of western Cuba, the land that produces the world’s best tobacco leaves, while the rose motif on the title matches the female presence.

The Punch trademark, registered since the mid 19th century, was meant to target the British market and had been named after a comic character similar to the French Punchinello. Punch was also a hot or cold drink that is usually a combination of hard liquor, wine, or beer and nonalcoholic beverages, and the name of a well-known weekly tabloid.

The owner, Manuel Lopez y Fernandez, renewed the trademark registration in 1900 in an effort to add new lithographic material. One of the new designs showed a jester surrounded by four scenes that depict different stages of the cigar hand-rolling process. The other design does exactly the same with the growing phase. Both of them are quite a lithographic lesson on the birth of Habano that’s put before the eyes of faraway smokers.