In the chronicles of Christopher Columbus’s first voyage –recorded in history as the “discovery of America,” the Great Admiral refers that upon arriving in Cuba, his ship was welcomed by canoes steered by men and women who held small bunches of quasi-golden leaves that, given their shape, resembled “muskets lit up on one end” that natives pressed between their lips, delightfully inhaling the aromatic smoke off that exotic plant, totally unknown for the crew at that time.

Those peaceful and innocent people were offering COHIBA to the colonizers as a token of friendship. That used to be their most precious treasure, the underpinning of their lives and a way to communicate with the gods. The Tainos called TOBACCO a two-pronged hollow cannula carved in wood that, unlike the leaves rolled into the shape of a musket, they used to absorb the COHIBA through the nostrils.

That was powder tobacco, what people now call snuff. As Columbus and his men heard the words pronounced by the Tainos, they mixed up the word COHIBA with the instrument called TOBACCO.

Let’s turn time back now to the palenque (party or festival) where the sacred ceremony known as the Cohiba Ritual is about to begin. An areito or ritual chant is being sung as the music fills up the atmosphere. The behique (tribe chief) also acts as the supreme priest. He has inhaled the smoke of the COHIBA, sitting on the ceremonial dujo, a lovely seat that recreates the form of an antediluvian animal. With his head leaning on his chest and his hands on his knees, he remains silent, submerged in somekind of profound trance. When the behique begins to speak, his voice sounds celestial and divine. Participants answer out loud to his words, each and every one of them telling what his or her problems are, concerned with the future of the tribe. They are also grateful that the gods –through the behique and by means of the Cohiba Ritual- are listening to them and dishing out wise solutions.

This used to be a double ritual. On the one hand, the nicotinia-tabacum was being administered to patients in the form of compresses, dressings, infusions and elixirs. On the other hand, the esoteric manifestation served to convey messages to gods like BAYAMANACO or ATABEY, as well as to the other Taino deities through aromatic smokes and the powder of the Cohiba or Cohoba.

Each section of the plant was used as medication. Moreover, tobacco has played and still plays a major religious role in the Americas. Native priests give top priority to purification rites just to enter into a trance and achieve supernatural healing powers, though from a botanical and pharmaceutical standpoint, this plant creates no hallucinogenic effects at all.

Priests and sorcerers in the Amazon region, the North Pole, Indonesia and Uganda rely on tobacco, and so do African- Cuban religions that have anointed it as the only way to make the EGUN or spirit of the dead step forward. Cigars are nowadays used by these priests to perform cleansings, to make forecasts and guessing, and to safeguard the souls.

Even though the Western civilization ignores this, the ritual is still going on obsessively all around the world by means of the billions of cigarettes and cigars that are consumed in every nook and cranny of the planet, as if every smoker were trying to connect with his or her secret gods, or maybe wanting to drive his most threatening evils away. On the face of the earth, tobacco is consumed by youngsters, the elderly, men and women of all races, from all regions, from all walks of life, no matter what their political, religious or economic leanings might be.

Fernando Ortiz used to say: “Tobacco was the Indian’s inseparable companion. From birth to death, the Indian used to live wrapped in the spiritual smokes of tobacco…” And archeologists are now revealing with amazement the high level of longevity that Cuba’s Tainos managed to achieve. These islanders, who paddled they way up from Venezuela, were descendants of Arawaks and Araucans.

The Tainos brought their knowledge, their gods and their mythology that eventually evolved on the Caribbean islands. As a result of that evolution, the Cohiba Ritual took shape as the core the entire economic, religious, political and social life of these primitive dwellers revolved around.

Tobacco was nothing but a wild plant from Yucatan, yet it was the Cuban Tainos the ones that first grew it and turned it into what it is known today. According to Taino mythology, the COHOBA plant, COHIBA or TOBACCO, was sent to the Earth by BAYAMANACO, the God of Fire, bearer of the casabe –the Tainos’ bread- and of a secret ritual: SALIVA-COHIBA-SEMEN. These three substances were the foundations of the entire human life, of all its features, and they brought benefits for men: fire, bread or casabe, tobacco and the SALIVA-COHIBA-SEMEN rite.

Nonetheless, it was impossible to stage the Cohiba Ritual without the presence of goddess ATABEY, the deity that had put men at the mercy of mysteries, wisdom and the valuable legacy that BAYAMANACO, the furious God of Fire, had brought to the face of the earth.

Bayamanaco had brought the Cohiba, the casabe and the fire, but those people couldn’t make ends meet or communicate with the afterlife through the Cohiba Ritual in any of its multiple expressions. Atabey taught them to till the land, to fish and hunt, to use Areitos as a vehicle of oral communication and as a way of passing valuable information from one generation to the next. She also taught them how to make casabe or cassava bread, and to observe the Cohiba Ritual to hook up with the gods.

Tobacco was not known in Africa before Columbus’s arrival in America. In the 17th century, the Portuguese took tobacco to the Black Continent when they traveled there to ship slaves back to their colonies. But the encounter of Africans and Cuba’s Indians gave tobacco a sacred position that’s widely used today by such religions as Santeria, Mayombe or Palo Monte, Abakua and the so-called Crossed Spirits. Since then, tobacco unifies people in a spiritual Mass. America’s original residents were no stranger to the Pipe of Peace as a unifier. Let’s all wish the spirit of the COHIBA, as it happened in the beginning, continues to be a vehicle to attain peace and unification for all mankind.

* Psychologist, sculptor, painter, writer, journalist and researcher specialized in pre-Hispanic Civilization. She has written several volumes on a number of topics, including The Cohiba Ritual, now in preparation.