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Home > What's New > An Interview with Cuba's Ricardo Alarcon
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On Visiting the Fields and Factories
MRS: You live in Havana. Do you ever visit the cigar factories?
RA: Yes, of course.
MRS: Which factories do you like to visit?
RA: Here in Havana, I have been to Partagas, which is downtown. And not far from here, Cohiba [Editor's note: This is the El Laguito factory, where most Cohibas are made.]
MRS: Do you go where the rollers are, the big rooms?
RA: Yes.
MRS: And when you're there, what kind of feeling does it give you? What kind of feeling does it give when you see these workers, many of whom have been sitting at the same bench for 30 years, for 40 years? What's it like when you walk through a cigar factory?
RA: I think it's a very fascinating kind of job. I have gone several times to cigar factories, to give lectures, to speak. You know, they have these sort of traditional lecturers, readers. [Editor's note: In Cuba's rolling rooms, there is usually a "reader," a person standing at a lectern and reading the newspaper or a novel to the rollers while they work.] And I enjoy looking at them. As a speaker, I always like to look at the faces of those in the audience. At a cigar factory, you look at a group of people who are concentrating on their jobs. They are producing cigars while listening to you. And you know something...
MRS: It must touch your heart.
RA: Yes, and some of the best cigars of my life came from those factories. Because you are speaking to them, but you are with your cigar. It's a kind of public gallery, where you can go to smoke. Some of the rollers have given to me as a gift, after my speech, the brand and type of cigar that they assume I would like, based on what I was smoking when I arrived at the place. But the best factory and the best cigar, in my opinion, is not any particular brand. The best thing is to have a good friend who works at the cigar factory and doesn't smoke. Then he can give them to you as gifts: tailor-made cigars! I have friends here--they ask me, "Do you like it a little bit thicker, a little bit thinner, a little bit milder or sweeter?" or whatever, and you can adjust. When I am asked, "For you, what is the better brand of Cuban cigar?" I say, "That one, the one that was tailor-made by a friend."
MRS: What brand and what size do you normally smoke?
RA: I usually smoke what I am smoking now, this type of Cohiba, which is the No. 2, the Lanceros, the long one. [Editor's note: The 7 1/2 inch by 38 ring gauge Lanceros is known in the factories as an El Laguito No. 2.] But, as a matter of fact, I don't have an exclusive preference. Sometime I prefer to have a Montecristo or sometimes I'll have an Upmann or sometimes a big Churchill.
MRS: The greatest region in the world for growing wrapper tobacco is the Vuelta Abajo. Have you ever had the opportunity to visit the fields?
RA: Yes, of course. Many times.
MRS: How do you feel when you're there, when you see the beautiful colors of the plants, and you see the workers, and you see the cheesecloth protecting the wrapper leaves, and so forth. What goes through your mind? What goes through your heart?
RA: Well, I think that, at that moment, you are in the heart of real Cuba, the profound Cuba. The heart of our nation. As a student, I loved a very serious essay on Cuban culture written by one of our main writers in the '30s. It was a counterpoint of sugar and tobacco. And that man was a big defender of cigars, of tobacco. He demonstrated how tobacco rolling and the whole process toward cigar production was the real, original Cuban thing. Sugar was introduced by the Spaniards. Everything else in our culture and our economy came from abroad. The only thing that the Spaniards found when they landed here were those Indians, as they called them, enjoying, as the description from Columbus goes, "some lovely, strange thing that's smoking." Nobody knows when that started, nobody knows from where it came, only that it originated here. And we also have the specific area from where the real thing comes. I have traveled a lot throughout Cuba. I have tried Cuban cigars from other parts of the country. From eastern Cuba, for example. And they are not the same. In Oriente, you cannot have the same kind of cigars that you have from Pinar del Rio.
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