Here's a quick tip if you're looking for cheap cigars:
Tobacco farmers are now allowed to keep a small amount of tobacco for themselves for their own use. As such, many of them roll the tobacco themselves and sell them to passing tourist groups. The prices are ridiculously cheap- 20 Cohibas can be bought for US$25. The drawbacks are that the cigars come unlabelled, uncertified, and bundled in paper instead of nice boxes, but those are minor drawbacks- especially when you consider that 20 Cohibas normally cost ten times as much.
On the other hand, never buy cigars from the street unless you are an expert at judging cigars. There are legitimate sellers, but the vast majority of them are fakes, made of inferior leaves or even banana leaves, dried and rolled in the same manner.
Cigars are, of course, one of Cuba's biggest exports. I've toured two cigar factories here and have enjoyed the tours very much. The Partagas Cigar Factory in Havana is a must-see, if only to see the actual huge room where hundreds of torcedor are skilfully putting their cigars together with deft, expert movements, wielding their special knives (chaveta). They make an average of 120 cigars a day- more for the smaller cigars, less for the big cigars- while listening to somebody read the daily news, or from great novels. That, in itself, is a very important tradition and has never changed- no radio, music, or audiobooks. Someone will sit in the front of the room and physically read into a microphone. Culture is a very important part of being able to roll a cigar properly, and it infects the way you handle the cigar.
I mention all this because today I visited the province of Pinar del Rio, where much of the tobacco for Cuba's cigars is grown. The miles of rolling countryside, dotted with palm trees, fields of tobacco, corn, sugar cane and other crops, and animals such as cattle, also have a distinctive feature in Western Cuba called mogotes. The rocks around Vinales are pure limestone formed in the Jurassic period around 160 million years ago. Unlike other rocks, limestone can be dissolved by water. Where a valley is formed in tropical limestone, often by downwards faulting of the rock, it may be filled with fertile red soil. Rotting vegetation increases the acidity of the groundwater on the valley floor. This highly acidic water eats into valley sides, undercutting the rocks and producing steep cliff-like features. These steep-sided hills are known in both English and Spanish by their Cuban name, mogotes.
The soil also determines the quality of the tobacco grown, and as we all know, the soil in Cuba is the best in the world for tobacco, hence the quality of the cigars that come from this country. Tobacco is never wasted- lower quality tobacco, and tobacco scraps from cigar production, are made into cigarettes. Tobacco is very labour intensive, and grown between October and December, harvested in January-March, and stored and aged for many months, or even years, before they reach the hands of the rollers.
When the tobacco fields are not in use for tobacco, corn is planted because it helps the tobacco fields recover. Thus, if you visit a tobacco farm in September, all you will see are fields of corn.
And that's all I saw in Vinales: corn.
Posted by pj at September 5, 2004 10:00 PM