Music has echoed the fame of tobacco through an assortment of compositions and styles. Songwriters and singers have not at all abstained from the desire of inhaling the smoke of a good Cuban cigar.

Pop music and cigars seem to go hand in hand in perfect harmony and it’s hard to tell when they first hitched up. They have both brought pleasure to those who consume them. Tobacco is the inheritance of “Indians and the adaptation of Negroes and white men; a half-breed product.” So half-breed as Cuban music really is. As early as in the 18th century, there was a song called Cachumbambe that was making the rounds at the time and had taken cigars into the lampooning spirit of the Cuban people. The tune used to read like this: “What Can a Frail Give You / No Matter How Much Love He Might Have? / Cinders of Cigar / And a Good Rest When You Die.

“Afro-Cuban music is fire, exquisiteness and smoke,” so there’ve always been and will always be great musicians, songwriters and singers that have inhaled the smoke of cigars. One of the them was no other than celebrated Italian tenor Enrico Caruso, who used to get a kick out of stogies, especially when they had just been rolled because –as he used to say- they tasted better. And he knew that too well as he toured the cigar factories of La Corona, H. Upmann and Partagas, where he was honored for his successful performances at Havana’s Tacon Theater. There, he sung Giuseppe Verdi’s Aida during his only visit to the island nation’s capital back in 1921.

In one of those factories, the great tenor belted out Rigoletto’s La Donna é Móbile. The workers got so astonished that they kept on clanging their jackknives on the tables for ten minutes straight and tossed a blizzard of Romeo & Juliet cigars all over him. A diligent Caruso bent down to pick them up and as he uttered: “It would be an insult to these ladies and gentlemen who have showered me with these cigars in such a tropical way, and secondly, because they’re way too expensive.” The owner of the factory, at the time on a trip to Nice, ordered the pictures of the Italian sensational singer to be published in the press and sent to Caruso’s hotel room a lovely humidor packed with cigars whose rings had his name stamped on them. The tenor was so astounded by the gesture that he remained smoking his favorite cigar brand till the day he passed away.

But Habanos are not only rolled to be smoked; there’s music in them, too. One of the best-known tunes, Green Tobacco by Eliseo Grenet, has been sung by countless lyrical crooners and pop music acts. This is how the lyrics go: The Plantation Gets Lost / In its Gauzes of Blue Fog / The Bright Sky / Its Fire Burns / The Lovely Growing Girl / Is Fruit in Kernel and Juice / And Cigar Lifts Up its Aroma / In a Thousand Spirals of Smoke / Blooming Green Tobacco / In Your Sight Reflects / A Haze of Hope / A Hue of Nostalgia / A Shade of Height / Blooming Green Tobacco / In Your Smile Reflects / Billowing Smoke that Goes Subtly / In Your Pale Face / The Plantation Glows / Under the Tropical Sun / And in Green the Clouds Dress / In Blue and Grey Too / And You’ll Be / Like Blooming Green Tobacco / A Breath of Life / In This Burning Land / Loved by God.

Tangos also took good care of cigar aficionados. Sara Montiel, born in the land of Don Quixote, performed a sensual version of Felix Garzo’s and Juan V. Masans’ Fumando Espero in one of Spain’s biggest box-office hits of all time, The Last Ditty. Some of the stanzas go like this: Smoking is a Pleasure / A Genial and Sensual Pleasure / Smoking I Wait / For The Man I Love / Behind the Glass / Of Gleeful Window Panes / And While I Smoke / I Don’t Squander My Life / Because as the Smoke Wafts / I Really Get Snoozed / That’s Why For Me / Smoking is a Pleasure.

Benny More’s wrote a son montuno called The Cigar Dropped Off Your Mouth that says: The Cigar Dropped Off Your Mouth / It Really Did, Buddy. And Agustin Ribot composed a guaracha entitled Pancho Cigar (Pancho Cigar / Hit the Jackpot / Now He Snubs Everybody.

Silvestre Mendez’s fondness of cigars gave him the nickname Tabaquito (Little Cigar); Amadeo Roldan always had a stogie pressed between his lips, and so did Gonzalo Roig and Compay Segundo, a man who once worked as a cigar roller and never quit the habit. Other enthusiasts of the world-class product have been Hungarian composer Bela Bartok, American composer and bandleader Leonard Bernstein, Austrian musician Arnold Schönberg, Argentina’s beloved Carlos Gardel, French crooner Edith Piaf, Spanish singers Isabel Pantoja, Joan Manuel Serrat, Joaquin Sabina, Luis Eduardo Aute, Paco de Lucia, Paco Ibañez and many other celebrated artists who have known what life is really like trapped between musical notes and smoking cigars.