There’s nothing like leaving behind the comfort of a planned tour and the services of a guide to drive your own way to a place like San Juan y Martinez, the land of the world’s finest tobacco

Perhaps becoming a backpacker is the best way to delve into the world of Habanos and unearth the hidden secrets that make San Juan y Martinez the land of the world’s best tobacco.

Driving to San Juan y Martinez is not a piece of cake. You have to steer past Havana and barrel down the Pinar del Rio Highway, making sure that the charms of places like Las Terrazas –a World Biosphere Reserve teeming with larger-than-life coffee plantations, an enchanted community, great spots for birdwatching and the chance to take a swim in the nearby river- don’t make you take a detour.

Another temptation on your way is Soroa, famous for its natural orchid garden and gasping waterfall. And try to dodge the highway that leads to Viñales, the prehistoric valley of round-top hills that invite passers-by to scour its caves and lavish scenery.

We’ve got our mind set on a different goal and that’s why we can only make a brief stop in the city, a moment to determine whether it’ll be better to rent a car or catch a ride in a vehicle. The point is that San Juan y Martinez is 18 long miles from the city of Pinar del Rio.

Either way, you don’t need to get to town to realize that tobacco is the star of the show in this neck of the woods. On both sides of the narrow, zigzagging road, jam-packed with horse-hauled buggies and people riding their bicycles, tobacco grows plentifully and drying barns show their rooftops through the fog –a common weather condition in Pinar del Rio that usually remains unchanged till noon.

Sooner rather than later, the traveler knows he or she has entered into a different world, a place with other traditions and timetables. In this location, days kick off long before sunup when the cattle is out to graze. By midday, the day is nearly over as workers whisk off the collected tobacco leaves on makeshift gurneys to the drying barns where women weave them together alongside wooden rods where they’ll dry slowly for a number of months.

In that period, workers ought to use cheesecloth to cover those plants targeted as exportable wrapper for cigars, remove the buds to prevent them from growing way too tall, fertilize them over and over again, use pesticides to thwart the threat of the leaf-staining blue moss, and finally collect the leaves. The collecting process begins from the bottom leaves up.

“During those days, there’s no time for anything,” says Pancho Cuba, one of those hicks who’ve been for over 60 years in the tobacco business and whose plantation can be reached from the Punta de Carta road, “taking a right turn and driving on for one and a half miles till you get to a house that looks like a soap opera estate,” as Mr. Cuba puts it.

Pancho Cuba is a short-sized, well-built and fast-paced guy with restless eyes who lives under the cheesecloth-covered plantation. Don’t ask him for a cigar because, as he says, he doesn’t have time to roll them. He occasionally fixes one for himself. For him, the best token of appreciation is give away a bundle of dry leaves. He wakes up early in the morning, doles out responsibilities among men and women, tours the farm on horseback and makes a stop in the evening to take a shower, tuck in some over-the-burner good and drink a shot of rum. Late at night, with his cigar still hanging from his lower lip, he goes out to take a look at the plants and check on the leaves that “sometimes at night straighten upward in search of the moonlight,” he says. Only after that routine, he goes to bed to dream of the thoroughbred he’s always wanted to own.

He’s not the only one in the zone that lives for and from tobacco. The entire community of San Juan y Martinez, as well as the neighboring municipality of San Luis, dances to the beat of a good or bad harvest, depending on the year. People hang out and talk about baseball or fertilizers, politics or rainfall. No wonder people in this region grow as many as 250 hectares of different types of tobacco, including 40 shade-grown varieties exclusively reserved for Habano wrapper.

This town trapped in time, though dotted with several malls and stores that have given it a bustling atmosphere never seen before, has also put a cap of its own on modernity. Two main streets cut the town in two halves: one for going and one for coming. The central park is right at the end of the highway. On one side, a tall wrought-iron gate reminds us that Hoyo de Monterrey once started there, the estate farm owned by Jose Gener, the Spaniard who fell in love with this territory and helped build in the 19th century one of the world’s most sought-after cigar brands. The entire town is an immense colonnade of interconnected verandas where neighbors talk to one another from across the street as they sway peacefully on their rocking chairs. The church park is not far from there, as well as the municipal museum and the former house of Luis and Sergio Saiz, two brothers who were murdered for their voiced opposition to the Batista dictatorship in the 1950s. The most curious thing around town is that you see tobacco wherever you look at: old men smoking in the porches, the collecting process going on in the entire community, the peasants steering their one-horse-hauled carts called “arañas” (spiders), or the bustling activity in the drying barns.

Once in town, it’ll be easy to find men like Gerardo Medina or old Lin Paz, 89, who still works the cheesecloth-covered fields and takes a personal lead on the harvest, tying up the gurneys with his own wrinkled and calloused hands before they head for the drying barn. Thin and brawny, this thin guy who flashes short smiles drinks no booze and smokes no cigars. He loves good, plain food. He lives in a house in the middle of the forest, hemmed in by hard-to-access dirt roads, though he likes spending time with friends like Pancho Cuba and Alejandro Robaina, the only alive man in Cuba whose name has been tacked on a cigar brand.

To the Vegas Robaina plantations, on the road to San Luis, people get quite easily. Everybody knows him. He’s nearly 90 years old and has traveled all around the world. However, he doesn’t give up on the chance to manage his own plantation. He’s up every morning at 5:00 o’clock, lights up his cigar and stands on his decked porch to keep an eye on every little detail.

His schedule is tight. So many visitors, from the island nation and overseas, the friends who visit his house –standing a mile from the main road. The place is busier than the town’s main street. That’s why he doesn’t attend to callers on Sundays. That’s the day to spend time with his family and puff at a cigar rolled by his own granddaughter. In the meantime, he listens to his other grandchildren and his sons as they are called to account for farm operations and sale volumes. The entire Robaina family lives for and from tobacco. At night before turning in, old Alejo –as his relatives nickname him- plumps down in his armchair and steals a long glance at the tobacco plantations shining in the distance. “Every night tobacco plants grow a few inches. It’s a pity nobody wants to work at that time anymore, otherwise I’ll order collections in the wee hours of the morning. That’s the time when tobacco looks prettier. Before I go to bed, I sit down to hear tobacco talk. It talks to me at night,” he admits.