- European passion.
OVER THE PAST FIVE CENTURIES, HABANOS HAVE ALSO SERVED TO MARK THE SOCIAL STATUS OF MANY EUROPEANS, GIVING THEM A TOKEN OF DISTINCTION AND GOOD TASTE FOR JUST HAVING ONE OF THESE GEMS PRESSED BETWEEN THEIR LIPS
Maybe it’s no wonder that five hundred years later, Gerard Depardieu, who masterfully played the character of the man who took tobacco to Europe –the Grand Admiral Christopher Columbus- is indeed a passionate Habano smoker.
When he beheld indigenous dwellers of the new lands blowing billows of smoke through their noses and mouths in a bid to communicate with their gods, and he took the rare plant called tobacco back to the Old World during his first journey, perhaps Columbus didn’t know that this plant would eventually revolutionize western traditions, maybe as dramatically as the discovery of the New World and the gold that flowed down across the pond.
Europeans kings and noblemen were the first ones to worship the aroma of tobacco, and since them many boldface names have been feverish smoking enthusiasts, especially of Habanos.
Many believe that some of Europe’s literary masterpieces over the past five centuries are considerably owed to the authors who found inspiration through billows of smoke that wafted up in the air.
The list could run on endlessly if all those celebrated names were to be mentioned, but a quick look should include Scotland’s Robert Luis Stevenson and his famous The Treasure Island; Arthur Conan Doyle and his Sherlock Holmes; France’s Charles Baudelaire, Honoré de Balzac, Gustave Flaubert, Albert Camus, Jean Paul Sartre, Julio Verne, Emile Zolá and Alejandro Dumas; Spain’s Pío Baroja, José Ortega y Gasset, Benito Pérez Galdós and Antonio Machado; Portugal’s Camilo José Cela and Fernando Pessoa; Britain’s George Gordon Byron and George Orwell, and lot of other European authors like Joseph Conrad, Bertolt Brecht, James Joyce and Bertrand Russell.
Many of them, either smokers of cigarettes or pipe tobacco, put a Habano in their mouth at least once in their lifetimes, puffing on them and feeling the taste of that faraway island Columbus discovered back in 1492. Through the rising smoke –just like Behike sorcerers used to do- they probably connected with the good in search of inspiration.
However, the literary world has not been the only field that has captured Habano lovers. Other arts also spun off followers of that magic plant rolled in Caribbean factories. Some of them took their affinity toward tobacco so far that they have been inexorably portrayed with either a pipe or a cigar, such as painters Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Edouard Monet and Pablo Picasso, and musicians like Frannz Liszt, George Bizet and Maurice Ravel.
Other famous smokers were such directors and actors as Groucho Marx, Jean Paul Belmondo, Alain Delon and even Marcelo Mastroniani; or the more contemporary Jane Reno, or Britain’s Jeremy Irons and Pierce Brosnan, known for many years for his Agent 007 character on the big screen. Even a few women like actresses Sarita Montiel and Penélope Cruz, German top model Claudia Schiffer, or transgressing writer George Sand, the penname of French baroness Amandine Aurore Lucile Dupin, were linked at some point in their lives to the taste for Habanos and the habit of smoking.
Scientists that have unraveled major enigmas of mankind were also inspired by tobacco, such as the cases of psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud or the genius called Albert Einstein, who shared friendship and passion for cigars with the great chess player Emmanuel Lasker.
Many European politicians from different times were also known for carrying a cigar in their hands, from Henry VII of England to King Juan Carlos of Spain, though perhaps the two best-known cigar-loving figures were German Chancellor Otto Von Bismarck, who used to have a stogie pressed between his lips while following the course of his battles, and larger-than-life British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, maybe the only world statesman with a vitola named after him.
Nonetheless, beyond celebrities, artists and politicians who like or dislike smoking, the true impact of tobacco on the European social life is the status it bestows when people are seen with one of them in any fancy lounge, while they slowly draw a pouch and, like any good gem deserves, handpick a Habano to light it up.
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