“I love making cigars. This is where I spent my life and it’s an art. Not everyone knows how to make cigars, just like not everyone knows how to paint a picture”, s enthuses the 55-year-old worker.
His job is to measure the suction level of each cigar in a metal tube to ensure that the smoker gets the perfect puff.
“If it’s less than 40, the level (of aspiration) is excessive, if it’s more than 80, it’s too low,” she explains, her eyes riveted on the needle. of the machine.
The El Laguito factory was inaugurated in 1966 in West Havana to make the cigars of Fidel Castro (1926-2016) and those he offered to his distinguished guests.
This is where Cohiba cigars were born, the most prestigious Cuban brand whose name refers to the way the Tainos Indians, the native people of the island, referred to the rolled tobacco leaves they smoked and which had so surprised Christopher Columbus on his arrival.
Rolling your own leaves is a tradition that lives on among peasants in the western province of Pinar del Rio, where most of Cuba’s tobacco plantations are located.
– Flavor –
It is in this factory and under this brand that the Lancero continues to be produced, the favorite cigar of Fidel Castro who had finally resolved to quit smoking in 1985, at the age of 59.
“Despite all the difficulties we have to face”, the objective is to manufacture “nearly two million” cigars in 2022, or approximately a daily production of 9,000 pieces, explains Oscar Rodriguez, the director of the factory.
Despite the coronavirus pandemic, the export of Cuban cigars grew by 15% in 2021, for a total of 568 million dollars, according to Habanos S.A., which includes all national brands.
Good news for the Cuban economy which is going through its most serious crisis for thirty years, with shortages and daily power cuts.
During the long months of the pandemic, the factory “did not stop for a single day”, to the point that cigars became “the country’s second export item”, underlines Mr. Rodriguez. Spain, China, Germany, France and Switzerland are the main buyers of Cuban cigars.
Deftly wielding a curved blade and a sticky substance, dozens of workers put the finishing touches to the ends of the cigars that have just been rolled.
About 60% of the workers are women, according to the tradition of this factory founded in particular by Celia Sanchez, the companion in arms of Fidel Castro in the mountains of the Sierra Maestra (east). It was about giving opportunities to single mothers or women in difficulty.
Norma Fernandez, another founder, died during the pandemic. It was she who rolled the cigars of the leader of the Revolution.
“It was a privilege to be able to say: I made the president’s cigars,” recalls Orquidea Gonzalez, who already worked at the factory housed in an elegant 1950s villa.
Caridad Mesa, now 55, started working in El Laguito as a cleaner. Thirty years later, she is responsible for flushing out the slightest fault in cigars.
You have to control “the quality, the weight, the size (…) the size”, she explains in front of boxes filled with cigars that her sharp gaze scrutinizes, under a portrait of Ernesto Che Guevara.
Cohiba cigars, which cover a wide range of models, can cost between $30 and $200 apiece, both in Cuba and abroad.
“Cuban tobacco stands out from all the others for the flavor that the land of Pinar del Rio gives it, where the best tobacco crops are grown”, points out Orquidea Gonzalez, for whom there is no doubt that the best tobacco in the world.
