Like many other fruits of nature and human creation, tobacco has be extensively extolled by literature.

It was perfectly natural for Cuban authors to write about it, on the right spot where colonization began and where the autochthonous jumped on a bandwagon packed with traditions and a way of life. Cigars were traditional commodities when Cuban kids were already belting out a riddle that harks back to the 19th century and goes like this: “Who’s that miserable / who never lets go of his coat / and his entrails covers with it / and always dies in flames?”

It enjoyed the grace of intellectuals from around the world in a process that revealed a colonization on the reverse: from mouth to mouth. Only a handful of people can actually forget the first advertisement that got into the hands of a child named Federico Garcia Lorca, the image of a cigar factory owner among medals and the predominant pink color of the case, evoked masterfully in his Son de Santiago de Cuba: “With the blond head of Fonseca / I’ll go to Santiago.”

A bold Lord Byron also echoed the unstoppable expansion of tobacco at the time: “From the smooth twilight of the studio / or coming from the vast choppy ocean / its slithering smoke circles the earth / triumphant from the Pole to England.” On his way from romanticism to naturalism, French novelist George Sand stressed the sentimental validity of cigars as he saw how they vanished up in the air to soothe the pain and fill up the solitude of a thousand gracious images. He was then responding to an invitation that had huddled statesmen, painters, scientists and poets.

This is nothing but a trend that has been downplayed by writers hailing from the five continents, including those who once longed for something else other than mere entertainment and used to scour the realm of philosophy through narrations and playwrights. That’s the case of Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre or Bertold Brecht, the renowned innovator of the performing arts who picked tobacco as the star of “Sechuan’s Good Soul.”

Brecht even imagined a theater for smokers, convinced the audience would be more inclined to thinking if they were allowed to smoke on their seats. The smoke of the aboriginal islanders of the Caribbean had prevailed, alongside the inhalation of quid and the art of chewing tobacco, habits that come to pass time and again in the pages of many novels, with the same strength its billows of smoke invaded monasteries and Rome’s St. Peter Cathedral, carrying a load of both extollers and detractors on its wings.

For long periods of time during its restless globetrotting, tobacco and cigars had to put up with the staunch opposition of monarchs and popes. Contrary to its initial purpose, prohibition stirred up the consumption and smuggling of tobacco. The rough adventures of pirates, corsairs and buccaneers were scented by tobacco aroma. When Asian and Arabic teas joined the rank and file of European traditions, coupled with American chocolate and cigars, the revolution of the senses was so intense that a moralist and tactful poet like Francisco de Quevedo took on the practice of scorning dignitaries: “Introducing powders and smoke here is wrong,” he grumbled as he ended up writing a quartet that reads: “May God kill you if an Indian mistreats you / making you drink chocolate / or take some kind of bizarre habit / that might eventually make you sneeze tobacco.”

Even though he was always at odds with contemporary writer Lope de Vega, the latter joined him in the endeavor to lampoon the herb and those who liked it that much: “Tobacco is wise enough / to make you all sneeze / they inhale smoke to speak / and their words are nothing but air.”

However, he didn’t stick to his guns for too long because, in response to Quevedo’s quartet, Lope de Vega coined an expression that served as a lifeline to help get misunderstandings straight: “Take a little bit of tobacco and your annoyance will vanish into thin air.” So much word-bandying laid bare that in Europe’s courts and literary guilds, the presence of powders and smokes from the New World was way too overpowering to make short shrift of it.

The simultaneous arrival of tea, coffee, chocolate and tobacco in Europe, made the foursome stick together like part and parcel. The infusion was kicking a pleasure that only a ball of chewed tobacco or a couple of puffs could round out. That’s exactly what Saxon poet Henry S. Leigh observed when he wrote: “Doesn’t a good after-dinner talk / take coffee, brandy and a good Habano?”

There’s no doubt those pleasures became notorious not for the healing properties referred to by the court physicians, but rather for their sensuality and their early hitch to a triumphant capitalism, a system that quickly realized these delicacies from the New World and Asia were tokens of elegance and finesse. In lousy bars and eateries that authorities had in the crosshairs at the time, coffee, tea and chocolate drinkers spent time cooking up off-the-wall hypotheses. The moment a man takes a pipe in his hands, he becomes a philosopher, said Sam Slick. Victor Hugo, for his part, praised tobacco as the plant that could turn thoughts into dreams. Thackeray wrote that the smoke of a good cigar could draw words of wisdom from the lips of a philosopher and shut the mouth of the simpleton. And so he underscored it in his Memoirs of Gluttony as he described a scene in which a couple of gentlemen were drinking coffee and puffing at stogies at the Foy Café in Paris: “Both knew the delicious herb from Cuba could put sweeter words in the philosopher’s ears than the chat of any woman.”

A poet of 19th century’s Cuba, Gabriel de la Concepcion Valdes (Placido), a man who staged one of the first protests against the Spanish colonial rule, extolled piracy in verses that reek of the nicotine-laden smoke: “From the bow of a brig / wrapped in his black cape / smoking a pure cigar / stuck in a silver pipe / before scores of robust men / who glue their eyes on him / was the bravest chief / that pirates have ever had.”

For Cuban writers, tobacco was something to be proud of. This is what Francisco Poveda had to say about it: “What can compare to you / fertile tobacco fields of Cuba? / Nothing!” Spaniards were the first Europeans that backed up Cubans in their effort to put the island’s tobacco on the map, a product that grabbed most of its fame and good name in Havana. They welcomed cigar smoking as a ceremony and gave it a special place in toasts and after-dinner talks. This is from Tirso de Molina’s The Villain Woman from Vallecas: “And if shelves galore / display pineapples from the New World / and in three or four tanks / mammies and cashew nuts lie / and chestnuts / if a peach is what you like / and pears, but I finally pull out / a good cigar / to blow blessings of smoke.”

This ritual, that in the mansions of well-to-do Cubans was accompanied by fine silverware, had reached the shores of Spain from the hands of Indians and travelers that returned from America dazzled by the riches of the New World.

Poets have highlighted the excellence of Habanos over other cigars from other parts of the world. That pride, in the face of phony stogies that can’t hold a candle to Cuban cigars, generated luxurious wrappings and differences as far as consumption was concerned. Rings and brands created with an artistic flair served to underline their undisputed quality. But at the end of the day, the whole thing was boiling down to just an intimate chat between the smoker and his cigar.

For Jose Marti, the Indian leaf brought “relief for mulling people and delight for daydreaming architects of the air, because the smoke is any man’s companion.” Henry James unearthed the plant’s compensatory virtues: “Herb of weird flower, empress of the smoke.” One of the greatest symbolist poets of all time, Stephane Mallarme, whose painter friends eternalized him blowing rings of smoke up in the air, spelled out the seriousness of the weightless smoke: “All resumed souls / I consume when it’s slow / before each blow of smoke / goes out another one / and the cigar says afterward / no matter how the consciousness burns / that ash is decadence / from a kiss of fire.”

Spain, the commercial hub where most tobacco exports were headed for, forged great fame in Europe and built a living monument to the plant: Seville’s cigar factory. The place hired a predominantly female workforce and the character of those workers gave rise to numerous stories and fantastic illusions. But one of those narrations climbed to the utmost –Prospero Merimee’s Carmen, musicalized by George Bizet- as the best-known tobacco opera of all time. That same eulogy comes around in The Seville’s Cigar Factory, an opera written by Soriano Fuentes.

Cuban poet Camacho Ramirez took particular lubricity in portraying those women who unnerve tobacco leaves over the curves of their thighs: “There are reeking cigar boxes strapped to the waist / with its scattered color staining the epidermis / and between their breasts the lost flavor / while the mashed juice rolls down their thighs.”

Let’s not forget the portraits of cigar smoking in anonymous Cuban compositions culled in the Black Verse Album (1953) and put in the powerful throats of practitioners of African-Cuban religious rituals: “That cigar I smoke / who brought it here? / A black woman from Mayomba / who came from Mayari / If you wanna know my name / with my smoke I’ll tell ya / my name’s Habano / coffee’s first cousin.”