The World’s Biggest Ritual

Since American Indians used to smoke it as part of their traditional rituals, tobacco has little by little spread all over the world in a multitude of forms. One of them, the Habano, has conquered the most demanding palates on the face of the earth

“The two Christians found many people on their way, men and women walking through their villages, holding a charred stick in their hands and herbs for the aromatic smoke they were inhaling.”

Those words were written by Rodrigo de Jerez, one of the sailors who accompanied Christopher Columbus during his first voyage to America, the very first encounter between Europeans and tobacco, a plant that sooner rather than later enthralled the whole world for its properties, including the habit of smoking cigars rolled with its leaves.

Demonized in the early days by the Church as a “malefic” custom, Rodrigo de Jerez was curiously one of the first men condemned by the Inquisition due to this “sinful and evil” tradition. However, that didn’t stop tobacco from going all the rage in Spain and from there to the rest of the world.

The Cohiba ritual –as Taino Indians called the smoking of tobacco reed in long pipes for spiritual purposes- existed as an ancient tradition long before the Spaniards landed in the New World. Mayans and Aztecs, for instance, had been using tobacco in their religious ceremonies for centuries, mixing it with other substances, as found in lots of stone-carved inscriptions and paintings in their shrines.

Moreover, many American peoples used tobacco as a medicinal remedy. In Mexico, the eastern part of America and in Canada, the Rustic Nicotine –a plant of narrow leaves and high contents of nicotine- was grown. This variety was so sour in taste that it had to be smoked in pipes, thus originating the famous expression to smoke the pipe of peace.

It was in 1510 when Francisco Hernandez de Toledo brought the seeds to Spain. Paradoxically, while the Church was condemning the habit of smoking tobacco, monks began growing it for ornamental and medicinal purposes in closed gardens inside the monasteries, a tradition that later on generated the term “stock” to call the outlets where tobacco used to be sold.

But perhaps the two persons who contributed the most to spread the fame of tobacco like a prairie fire all across Europe were Jean Nicot, the French ambassador to Portugal in the 16th century, who brought that rare ground powder to the French court of Queen Catalina de Medici to soothe her headaches; and English corsair Sir Francis Drake, who put tobacco on the English map in 1585.

Nicot was immortalized by Swedish botanist Linneo in his treaty on Species Plantorum plants, eventually labeling tobacco as Nicotiana Tabacum in tribute to the French ambassador. For his part, Drake went in the record books as a pirate rather than discoverer. His fellow Briton Sir Walter Raleigh, the explorer who discovered tobacco in the North American coast of Virginia, raised eyebrows with his pipe in the court of Queen Elizabeth I and definitively introduced the plant in that European territory.

The new product soon reached out all across Europe and Russia, landing in China, Japan and the African west coast in the 17th century. Shortly after that, Spain got a hold on the tobacco trade monopoly and founded the tobacco stock for Castile and Leon in 1634. However, in 1707 that regimen wove webs all across the Spanish Crown’s territories and eventually banned all cultivation of the plant in the peninsula in an effort to ease customs regulations. The extension of the Spanish tobacco stock to Cuba, where a considerable chunk of the production was clinched, prompted numerous riots and uprisings until 1735 when Spain passed on the exploitation of the product to the Havana Company.

Nevertheless, the English-speaking colonial territories in the Americas became the leading tobacco producers in the world as soon as growth kicked off in Jamestown. By 1615, tobacco became a staple and the number-one foreign exchange for the colonial trade. In 1776, the cultivation spread to North Carolina and advanced westward to Missouri. In 1864, a farmer from Ohio accidentally came up with a pale, chlorophyll-deprived stump that soon became known as white burley and wound up being the main ingredient for American pipe tobacco mixtures, especially after the invention of the cigarette-rolling machine in 1881.

So, either ground in snuff powder, in thin pipe tobacco for cigarettes or pipes, or just rolled into cigars, tobacco conquered the world, though it was Cuba, and chiefly the lands of Vuelta Abajo, the ones that turned Habanos into deluxe items that today bring delight to the most refined palates on the planet.