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CIGAR ROLLERS STAND FOR ONE OF OUR NATION’S MOST SIGNIFICANT GROUPS. IT’S A REFLECTION OF THE PROGRESS THE TOBACCO INDUSTRY HAS LEFT IN CUBAN SOCIETY AS AN INDELIBLE MARK

Cigar roller is a simple word that turns minds on about tobacco leaves, jackknives, vegetal glue, molds and guillotines. All of them in a nonstop, smooth, artistic and surgical movement in which men and women dedicated to this trade manage to carve fillers, binders and wrappers –shipped from different regions of black tobacco- into the world’s finest rolled cigars.
Over two hundred years, the fame of tobacco from Havana or Cuba has been pinned on them because, even though tobacco planters engage in a painstaking job under the sun, the hands and eyesight of the cigar rollers turn those leaves into the coveted end product.
When Cuba was barely known around the world, people used to carry its name in a variety of ways: snuff, branch, pipe tobacco and others, while rolled cigars were every smoker’s delight. The history of cigar rollers is both longstanding and complex, bearing in mind that “tobacco and sugar are the powerhouses that support our nationality,” as Cuban sage Fernando Ortiz once put it. They stand for one of our nation’s most significant groups. It’s a reflection of the progress the tobacco industry, like no other walk of life, has left in Cuban society as an indelible mark.
The freedom to grow tobacco –officially authorized in 1614- helped spread out the regions to get the coveted leaves. Once the tobacco ban –it kept the industry bogged down for a hundred years- was lifted by King Felipe VII in a royal decree signed in 1817, planters were granted the liberty to grow, manufacture and sell tobacco.
Demand for Cuban tobacco called for the consolidation of a state-of-the-art and powerful industry, as well as for work specialization in a bid to meet the market’s requirements. Even though the early cigar rollers were the very planters who used to roll their own cigars for their personal consumption, the village of San Cristobal de La Habana and the island nation became dotted with workshops –mostly mom-and-pop businesses- that created jobs for cigar rollers.
In the early 19th century, cigars were rolled in factories, jails, hoosegows, garrisons, children’s homes –beginning in 1799- where inmates and refugees were supposed to devote themselves to the “teaching of releasing cigars.” Cigars were also rolled in private houses and in the new cigar factories that were setting up shop. The first workshop belonged to Francisco Cabañas and had a payroll of 16 laborers.
In the 1820s, the number of workshops and cigar rollers accrued. The Spanish Crown dictated several orders, edicts and articles, such as the royal order dated January 25, 1827, that stated that “from that moment on, no manufacturing tax would be levied on cigar rollers and factory owners, thus giving them the freedom to do business without being subjected to the tax they were bound to pay in the past.”
A handful of additional pages will be needed to summarize the cigar rollers’ other sides because their actions have spoken loud and clear about the culture and the nation, let alone the tremendous influence they have exerted on the Cuban society. They founded the Sociedad de Socorros Mutuos de Artesanos in Havana, “La Fraternal” in Santiago de las Vegas and the Sociedad de Artesanos de San Antonio de los Baños, basically made up of cigar factory workers and the Tobacco Industry Guild. They were the first workers to go on strike in the late 19th century and the early 20th century. In the heart of the Cuban migration in the U.S., Jose Marti labeled them as “the working mob, the ark of our alliance, the fabric embroidered by women’s hands where Cuba’s sword is sheathed,” (Jose Marti, Complete Works, Vol. IV, page 278). Men like Miguel Fernandez Roig, murdered during the Republic, and Lazaro Peña, leader of the Cuban unionists, were both cigar rollers.
Cigar rollers continue working hard for the sake of better quality in the factories, Casas del Habano and other locations. This army of men and women –mostly youngsters- keep up their creative work with new vitolas in an effort to make habanos stay as the benchmark it has been for over two centuries.  
There are fifty cigar factories devoted to exportation, with over a thousand cigar rollers and 350 other laborers who conduct tasting sessions on the vitolas. They have undertaken the same trailblazing principles of the early rollers, using their hands to roll tobacco leaves into genuine gems that continue to fulfill their mission as Cuba’s ambassadors around the world.
Therefore, nobody but a cigar roller to say the farewell remarks to our readers. He’s 92-year-old Gilberto Suarez Trujillo, who started working in this trade in 1939 and is now retired. His prodigious memory opens up like a shoebox full of mementos. These are the words he’s now sending to all of today’s Cuban cigar rollers and to our readers:
“An ode to discipline and unity is the message to Cuba’s cigar rollers. A cigar roller’s table should continue to resemble a country’s diplomatic mission in another nation.”