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"“The plantation is life, is like a vice. you’ve got to be there to feel it, to realize how much worried tobacco growers are about their outcomes, from the planting to the harvest.” Filiberto Cruz valdes, planter of shade-grown tobacco in San Juan y Martinez."
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"Work is the only sight in the horizon; anyone can tell it efortlessly by just looking up at their faces, their skins and calloused hands"
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In the distance plantations look like postcards. but making such an amazing scenery real takes great efforts and long hours of hard work
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"Gerardo Medina Reloba, 79, is one of vuelta abajo’s best-known and hard-working growers"

Il the joys of a tobacco grower germinate in his working desire. The field blooms with illusions that help him carry on with his life as new theories of his own about the good fortune of being alive arise.

Make no mistakes about it; for these men the only thought that counts time and again is how to make the plantation produce. That’s the key to their historic grandeur.

What do they do day after day for nine long months, stuck in the mud, soaking wet or under the sweltering sun, boxed in by a sea of green leaves?

They plow, sow, irrigate, hoe, weed out, drive oxen, remove buds, take care, harvest, pamper each and every plant and each and every leaf. Sometimes they do all that so many times a week that it seems as if they would have lost the notion of both space and time, trapped in the middle of the lavish plantation which is, as a matter of fact, their only connection to the world. And far in the distance, a sort of bucolic postcard –few people know for sure how much effort takes to make it look so lovely– shines.

That’s what a tobacco plantation is all about: a paradise that rubs off an extraordinary feeling of freedom and peace on anybody, where the air that you breathe is purer, the sky seems taller and the green looks greener. It’s like an odd natural equation that anybody could simply mix up with perfection.

Tobacco growers, though, do know that idyllic picture is riddled with challenges and efforts, that nature hangs on it like a pendulum: sometimes noble and sometimes cruel, or simply jumps on your back like a hungry beast. Even though they cling to the belief that hard work is the only way to make a plantation thrive –anyone can tell it effortlessly by just looking up at their faces, their skins and calloused hands- they feel tremendous pride and proverbial happiness in their hardened fate ahead. They just don’t fit any- where else on the face of the earth. As long as the sun continues to rise every morning and they can hold on to their hopes of happiness, they will have the strength to carry on, something to believe in and hang on to. To them, the only possible and foreseeable future is to get the job done in the exquisite elegance and pleasure of a habano.

That truth is simply overwhelming, and so are the calmness of the tobacco grower, the tiny scale of his euphoria, the monumental humbleness that singles him out and his recurrent desire to see the morning break like an indeclinable invitation to the silent enjoyment of such a demanding treasure.

The best way to find that out is by getting lost in the fields of San Luis and San Juan y Martinez, in Cuba’s Pinar del Rio, down quiet, zigzagging roads that slither through the tobacco plantations and discover the humble, yet immaculate houses of those farm workers.

Wives and children, grandchildren, nieces and nephews love the main tobacco growers, many times personalized in candid old men of weather-beaten faces and hardened hands who are tokens of family unity, or in their elder or younger offspring that carry the same ancestral torch of the generations before them, as well as huge amounts of enthroned knowledge. That’s just another virtue these men can brag about: the plantation enthralls and the growers are usually the fruit of a tradition that sows the same seeds, the same roots, the same leaves and the same dreams in their minds, all those things that once whetted their fathers’ imagination.

Growers are profoundly aware of the important role they play in a successful harvest. If it’s a good one, whatever might come next will be wonderful

Growers are profoundly aware of the important role they play in a successful harvest. If it’s a good one, whatever might come next will be wonderful and that explains their steadfast decision to cling to that probability as the only possible denouement.

Several dozen men from different generations remain scattered in the fields of San Juan y Martinez, though they are knit together by the invisible threads of a common history as tobacco growers who keep on turning a blind eye to the avalanche of modernity.

The leaves of their plantations are the best judgment they can get, and figuring out there’s no revelation in this world as sweet as dawn over these fields teeming with green and tender gleam could also be a part of paradise.

Family tradition is commonplace among these men whose parents and grandparents were tobacco planters just like them