The Habano’s Cuban Sensuality

The Habano has exerted an intense fascination on both the lives and works of many artists, including Cubans

It was maybe Maria de las Mercedes Santa-Cruz y Montalvo, Countess of Merlin born in Havana in 1789, one of the first-ever women who acquired a liking for good cigars. An elegant prose writer, an unstinting traveler, a friend of boldface artists like Goya, Balzac, Lizt and George Sand, the Countess of Merlin carried her long and illustrious name through rings of smoke from a good Habano.

A coeval colleague of his, Cirilo Villaverde, author of Cuba’s only literary myth, Cecilia Valdes, also paid tribute to his roots –he had been born in Pinar del Rio- and broached his passion for tobacco and cigars in many of his books. And in the early 20th century Nicolas Guillen saw the light of day, the man who penned his anthological work Motivos de Son, in which he forged a new poetic metric. The intensity, originality and Cuban flavor of his verses always remained a part of him, as much as his unimpeachable look of well-dressed mulatto wearing an ironed guayabera and carrying traveling Habanos in his pockets.

On the other hand, a diehard Havana-born man and a contemporary of Guillen, Jose Lezama Lima, an essayist, poet and author of Paradiso, one of Cuba’s indispensable novels, was an obsessive smoker. His liking for Habanos went far beyond his limitations as an asthmatic person. He loved smoking so much that he was hardly ever seen without a cigar trapped between his lips.

Quite curiously, versatile actor Jorge Perugorria reached worldwide stardom in the film Strawberry & Chocolate, by Tomas Gutierrez Alea, in which he plays a homosexual who pays tribute to the most refined Cuban culture and to the island nation’s best artistic and cultural values. The crux of the character’s concept is no less than a Lezamian dinner, similar to those described in the pages of Paradiso that always ended with the pleasure of sipping a cup of coffee and puffing at a good Habano. And as a finishing touch to his Cuban-style sensuality, Pichi, as his friends call him, is a regular cigar smoker.

A world-class composer, orchestra conductor and superb guitarist, Leo Brower, a virtuoso who has made his own contributions to universal music with such pieces as Elogio de la danza, El decameron negro and Concierto de Lieja, is in addition a grandnephew of another cigar-adoring musician, Ernesto Lecuona. Mr. Brower likes sharing his muse-inspiring moments of composition and relaxation with the billowing smoke of a good cigar.

Journalist, author, literary critic, philologist and scriptwriter Leonardo Padura has insisted in giving a cigar scent to one his most celebrated characters, police detective Mario Conde, for whom smoking “is a party of the senses and the pleasures. It rejoices the sight, awakens the smell, rounds up the sense of touch and creates the good taste that ends with a good after-meal cup of coffee. That’s music to anybody’s ears.”

An image hunter, as Liborio Noval defines himself, owns up that his relationship with Habanos is genetic because he learned to smoke long before he discovered the art of film developing as he used to watch his father puffing at stogies. And that built a bridge between cigars and his artistic creation. He still recalls a flight attendant who tried to upbraid him for smoking a putout cigar. For this shutterbug who has taken amazing pictures of Che Guevara and Fidel Castro, keeping a Habano in hand, either burning or not, is quite an inspiring habit.

A number of recognized Cuban painters of today, like Arturo Montoto, have felt the Habano’s magical seduction during their moments of creativeness. Montoto has even made still-life representations of several utility items related to cigars. His papaya slices and orange rinks that seem to come alive as they rest on the top lid of a humidor or a case of Lusithania, could serve as perfect examples to illustrate this assertion.

A renowned researcher of African-origin religions like Natalia Bolivar hasn’t escaped the fascination for the ultimate smoke, either. She learned to smoke cigars as a teenager, watching her nanny drive worries off her mind through the smoke of a cigar, a tradition that, as Natalia herself puts it, has helped men to communicate with their gods in a number of religious creeds, like Regla Palo Monte, or Regla de Ocha, a religion in which all male deities are the owners of tobacco, or Abakua, a secret brotherhood in which the members’ spirits are purified with the smoke of burning cigars.

The point is that absolutely no one can break free from the jinxing power of Habanos. Not even Cuba’s national hero Jose Marti did, and though he was not a smoker himself, he couldn’t resist to write a chronicle entitled The Tobacco, in which he extolled the plant’s medicinal properties and praised the wonderful and exorcizing ritual of watching, touching, smelling and smoking a good Cuban cigar.

Armando Cristóbal Ferval y Archivo Excelencias