“Though Cuba’s economic imagination is closely linked to sugar, to such an extent that a considerable chunk of the island’s history is told under the shadow of the ups and downs of the sugar-democracy studied by Moreno Fraginals, here comes the token of tobacco’s Cuban identity as a crop and culture of the good cigar and the pleasure of smoking. There are no cigars like Cuba’s, no matter how hard other tobacco industries have strived to be up to par with them…

“… it’s been Cuban tobacco the one that has given a name to the most perfect creature ever sired by the industry: the Habano, that living body that, if well taken care of, gets better as time ticks by, giving the lips the texture of a reencounter with oneself, and the nose the aroma of the finest piece of tamed nature.”

Excerpts from Manuel Vazquez Montalban’s foreword to The Lovely Habano, by Reynaldo Gonzalez, Ikusager Publishing House, Vitoria, Spain, 1998

by Manuel Vazquez Montalban*