Offering a quality cigar has become a custom which is unfortunately becoming more and more lost. However, a “good” cigar is like a “good” wine, a pleasure that is earned and which reflects a certain lifestyle. And who says quality cigar, says Cuban cigar.
But where does this pleasure come from? The answer is more or less known. We probably remember that our school textbooks of the time told us about the peace pipe that our Native American brothers offered to white European visitors as a gesture of goodwill, cooperation, even friendship.
This is a bit like how it happened, it seems, when the explorer Christopher Columbus made landfall in Cuba, in the Bay of Baracoa, on the eastern tip of the peninsula, there are more than 500 years. The natives, men and women, Taino Indians, rolled up a mysterious leaf which they then set on fire to breathe in the smoke thus released. They called this leaf cohibahence the name given to a prestigious brand of Cuban cigars. In the 1970s and 1980s, we saw large billboards everywhere in Cuba reading: “Cohiba, the first name of tobacco», all adorned with the impressive figure of an Indian. Today in Cuba, we are talking about a cigar to designate a cigar made on site with 100% tobacco leaves from Cuba, or a puremore familiarly.
All kinds of virtues were attributed to this “smoking”, both medicinal and spiritual. But this tradition goes back much further than Spanish colonization. The Mayans and the Incas also used it for medical, religious and political purposes, just like our Iroquois. It was used, among other things, to apply poultices to wounds from animal bites or to seal alliance or peace treaties.
If tobacco was mainly smoked directly from the leaf rolled up or shredded into small pieces, then placed in a pipe or calumet, we discovered that certain Indians chewed it, as did my maternal grandfather, a vaguely mixed race related to Louis Riel. Nicotine – Jean Nicot, a French diplomat, introduced it to France around 1560, hence the term nicotine – produces an addictive effect and can serve as both a stimulant and a sedative, providing in both cases a state of well-being. be.
Fifty years earlier, a Spanish naval officer had carried seeds of this mysterious plant in his luggage. This is how tobacco cultivation spread quickly, even as far as China and Russia. But Spain banned private production on its territory for a certain time, in order to better control and tax tobacco imports. Cuba took advantage of this and became the privileged place for tobacco cultivation, with Havana as the capital of production and export, thus developing a mastery and know-how that is worth its weight in gold today. Nowhere else in the world have we been able to develop all the techniques and subtleties of the cultivation and manual production of cigars, with the meeting of the best conditions combining climate and soil, where nothing is left to chance, while being under control (controlled), even in the event of a cyclone.
This mastery, this know-how has a price, of course, and cigars are not accessible to all budgets, just like champagne or a Côtes du Rhône Grand Cru. You must therefore watch for the right opportunity to treat yourself to such a moment of ecstasy. But if you come to Cuba, ask the hotel staff. Everyone knows someone, a neighbor, a friend of a friend, a brother-in-law, a sister-in-law who works in a tobacco factory. These workers have the right to take home daily a very small quantity of these cigars handmade, “for their own needs”. Very often, to make ends meet, they sell a few at a very good price. These are, in general, very high quality cigars, but they are not allowed to be sold with the ring that would identify them. But you don’t risk being scammed this way, and it’s legal.
And then, find yourself a smoking companion. Smoking a good cigar should be a shared pleasure. This is what I wish you for 2025, among other things…
