From the moment it became a token of pleasure and trade, tobacco has been either directly or indirectly linked to the life of Cubans as a reminder of their own existence.

The billows of smoke wafting in the air permeate as good as it gets everything related to the Cuban character, to the Cuban identity, giving a shot of moxie to a way of loving, feeling and thinking with the beauty of its hazy rings. For Cubans, tobacco is highly important and therefore it’s undoubtedly a part of their national identity and their culture, characterized by a series of developments that started out right when Spanish conquistadors discovered the plant and shipped it to the Old World. This is no doubt a benchmark in traditions, the history, the legends, the myths and the religion of the Cuban people, a flagship product as emblematic as sugarcane, a crop that helped found the country and served as underpinnings for the making of fortunes and the forging of a nation. Cuba’s cultural identity makes habanos hold one of many reasons and quirks as far as the language, the national history, the fine arts, the architecture and even the landscape, the trade, the economy and life itself are concerned. A good case in point is the word Habano that, according to the Royal Spanish Academy Dictionary, is defined as “pertaining or related to Havana, by extension to the island of Cuba and particularly to Cuban tobacco.” Look up deeper and it also reads, “the color of light tobacco; cigar made on the island of Cuba with leaves of a plant hailing from that country.” Moreover, even Cuba’s geography is riddled with Habano-related implications, not to mention its tradition in vitola collection and lithography, whose advances in image and picture making through the years were marked by the demands of producers and owners dating back from the colonial rule to date. And so it happened in architecture if we were to remember that tobacco paved the way for the building of large-scale factories big enough to accommodate the entire cigar-making process in just one place. Poets, painters, sculptors, photographers and even politicians have found in the tobacco grown in their land the special strength they once needed and have eventually carried it with them as an amulet. The image of larger-than-life world revolutionary Che Guevara is any Cuban’s memory of a man with a cigar; or crooning icon Compay Segundo (Francisco Repilado), who is so hard to find in any photographic file without a stogie in his hands, chiefly for a man like him who had once worked as a cigar roller in a Havana factory. Apropos of tobacco, writer, ethnologist and president of Cuba’s National League of Writers and Artists (UNEAC), Miguel Barnet, once said in an interview: “all of my books contain references to tobacco. Smoking cigars is for quiet men… tobacco is what novels are for literature; and the cigar is a story.”

An identity for forever more We might say everything began when Rodrigo de Xerez and Luis de Torres, Christopher Columbus’s finest men, chanced upon tobacco leaves. In addition to reaching America’s shores, they had also discovered tobacco. On October 27 of that same year, the Spanish fleet had reached the shores of the Caribbean island. Regardless of the curious happenings that came to pass at the very beginning, the Columbus’ envoys spotted some Indians who were putting rolled-up leaves in their mouths. In their fledgling smoking habit, they used a Y-shaped pipe that some called cojiba, cohoba or cohiba –the name of Cuba’s most emblematic cigar brand. Since then and amid rifts and squabbles, tobacco was little by little elbowing its way through and became so mighty a commercial item that captivated such extravagant buffs as pirate Francis Drake and corsair John Hawkins, who goaded their followers into assailing ships while “billowing smoke,” a tradition that marked their wicked deeds back in the 16th century. Many businesses were built back then in exchange for a few bales of tobacco. Therefore, the leaves started leaving their footprints everywhere, down the most incredible and least beaten tracks, conquering unbelievable consumers even in the most unexpected places. By Royal Decree signed on October 20, 1614, the growing of tobacco was allowed, yet a similar document banned the free marketing of the product. The monopoly on the leaf in Cuba was established following a Royal Decree inked on December 18, 1749, a move that paved the way for the foundation of the Havana Royal Commerce Company. From that moment onward, periods of stockpiling and de-stockpiling, wars and orders, followed. The overriding of that privilege in 1817 made it reach its pinnacle. The consumption of tobacco as snuff was virtually fading away as hand-rolled cigars started catching on, thus prompting the opening of dozens and dozens of new small workshops everywhere, especially in Havana. Then the factories popped up to spruce up the city. Since they were non-machinery, silent industries that gave out no reeking smells, the facilities were being built right on the main avenues and walkways, in the downtown areas, their decorated façades jutting above the neighboring houses. Their designs helped the Cuban capital grow and look prettier, with tobacco and cigars making a meaningful and special contribution of their own in this sense. These happenings left their marks for all times to come, in all generations, in all words, in the whitish shade of the cigar smoke, in the heat a Habano can give off, in the compact form of the tobacco leaves that when bound together they can bring superb delight. And even in the Cuban-African religious rituals the exquisite aroma of a burning cigar can help worshippers touch base with their gods, just another tradition and one of the many curious sides of tobacco and of the art of being Cuban. Nothing can be more patriotic and revealing in the history of Cuba and its relation to tobacco that the preparations for the 1895 Independence War, a period in which Cuba’s National Hero Jose Marti used to gather with cigar rollers from Tampa, Key West and New York in the U.S. A development that played a role in the start of the war happened when Marti sent the uprising order inside a cigar in the hands of a roller, scheduled for February 24, 1895 –the most outspoken and unmistaken example of what tobacco and cigar mean to the Cuban people.

“Indian leaf, the comfort of the thoughtful, the delight of daydreaming air architects, fragrant heart of winged opal.” Jose Marti on tobacco