Cuba grapples with the uncertain future of a national symbol, the cigar
With climate change affecting tobacco farming, the Cuban cigar is under severe threat
*Originally aired on Feb. 5, 2024
It's estimated that from seed to box, more than 200 pairs of hands touch each cigar that is made in Cuba.
A valuable export, and a draw for many visitors to the island nation, the artisanal tobacco product is both a historic national industry, and a point of national pride.
"It is in my blood to grow tobacco," said Hector Luis Preto, who has a farm in the Pinar del Rio village of San Juan y Martinez.
IDEAS contributor and freelance writer Pedro Mendes visited the farmer when he travelled to Cuba last fall, to learn about both the cigar-making-process, and what tobacco means to Cubans.
"Tobacco is part of my family, it is part of myself," Preto told Mendes, standing in a freshly tilled field ready for shade grown tobacco, the delicate leaf used to wrap the outside of a cigar.
The cost of climate change
These days, it is growing harder to farm tobacco in Cuba.
Climate change has made growing conditions increasingly unpredictable, with a longer and wetter rainy season, and more intense storms.
In September, 2022, Hurricane Ian struck the western end of Cuba. A few hours later, the many tobacco farms of the province of Pinar del Rio were unrecognizable.
Plowed fields had become lakes. Some estimates suggest that 90 per cent of the region's tobacco curing barns were wiped out.
"A lot of people would be very depressed to see that everything they worked on for 20 years was destroyed in a few hours."
But for Preto, "You just have to close your eyes and start doing the [cleanup] work, with the goal in your mind to begin planting the tobacco."
The farmer, his family, and workers worked on a massive day and night rebuild for weeks, in order to get that autumn's tobacco seed in the ground.
"Climate change is a reality," he said. "It's all around the world and that includes us. The thing is, we need to adapt to the changes. We cannot see our lives ended because of climate change, we need to find solutions."
In addition to climate-induced damage, today's Cuban tobacco farmers face other challenges, such as finding workers and making their product financially viable.
Falling global demand for cigars means lower prices for the leaf.
But inside Cuba, unrelenting U.S. sanctions and a post-pandemic tourism slump have led to an unprecedented economic crisis.
According to a March 2023 CBC News report, the conditions have have sent Cubans fleeing the country "in record numbers in response to unprecedented levels of poverty and political repression."
A tobacco industry with deep roots
The present and future may be uncertain. But according to Zoe Nacedo Primo, former director of Havana's Tobacco Museum, the leaf remains solidly at the centre of Cuba's image of itself.
"You find songs dedicated to tobacco," said Nacedo Primo.
"If you consider visual arts, there is a lot of work by our artists dedicated to tobacco. Because tobacco has always been the main, initial, oldest symbol of our culture."
Its farmers are also a symbol of nationalism, and resistance.
In the early 1700s, Cuban tobacco farmers rose up when the Spanish colonial rulers imposed a trade embargo. At the time, tobacco farmers could only sell their crop to the Spanish Crown, at prices determined by the Crown, not the market.
Now it is the Cuban government that holds the monopoly.
Cuban women make cigars
As for the workers who see these cigars to completion, Zoe Nacedo Primo points out: "There is something very important here that needs to be talked about: the role of women."
The tobacco historian explains that, in the past, it was unacceptable for women to take on production jobs, so "for years and years," they made cigars secretly at home, selling them at market.
After the revolution in 1959, a school was created for female rollers in Cuba, which changed the reality for women working with tobacco.
Now women are working at every stage of cigar production.
"If you had interviewed me just five months ago, most of the factories in Havana were run by women. Of the five factories, four had female directors," said Nacedo Primo.
Tobacco like the 'cycle of life'
At the Partagas Factory in Central Havana, hundreds of workers sort, blend, roll and box thousands of cigars a day, seated at small wooden tables, worn down with age, working diligently.
One middle-aged woman — a master roller with over 25 years experience — lifted up a small wet cloth covering a pile of tobacco leaves.
The roller placed the large leaf on the table and used a small, hand-held blade called a chaveta to trim it to size. She then placed a prepared bunch of filler leaves on the wrapper leaf and slowly, masterfully — while shifting and stretching the wrapper — rolls the cigar.
It is then placed in a cutting device that trims off the rough edge. The result is a perfect looking cigar, ready for its final stages before being sold, including being banded and boxed.
Another master roller, Arnaldo Osvalles Brinones, works part time as the house roller at the Melia Habana Hotel's cigar shop.
Retired from a career in the Cuban tobacco industry, he once served as director of production at El Laguito factory, where Cohibas are made.
Mendes asked Brinones what it felt like to have the cigar, a handmade piece of art, an object that symbolizes Cuba itself, burn and turn to ashes.
"That's what life is like," said Brinones between puffs of blue smoke.
"Today we are here. Tomorrow we aren't. But life continues. Things are born, they grow and they die. It's the cycle of life. And tobacco is part of that cycle.
"Tobacco plants are born. They are cultivated. They're combined into a cigar. And finally, someone will light that cigar and it will become a part of their life."
*This documentary was produced by Pedro Mendes.
