Posted: 04:04 PM ET, 02/25/08I woke up this morning in Havana in my hotel, the Melia Cohiba, and after a quick café con leche in the bar, I walked out onto the Malecon boulevard that skirts the sea in front of the city, and breathed the fresh sea air with a mixture of diesel and other smells of a bustling city. Read more
Posted: 11:27 AM ET, 02/21/08Baseball is king in the Dominican Republic, so when the Cigar Family Charitable Foundation created a school for the impoverished children around the Chateau de la Fuente tobacco plantation it was only natural to include a baseball field. But baseball fields cost money, and there was only so much to go around, and other, more pressing projects meant the field and the children’s fun had to wait. Read more
Posted: 11:13 AM ET, 02/20/08By my calculations, I drank about $400 worth of Scotch whisky at lunch the other day.
Before you go jumping to the same conclusion that my wife did—that I must have tied one on pretty hard—let me say that I only had a couple of drinks. Read more
Posted: 10:53 AM ET, 02/19/08The news last night about Fidel Castro retiring from political duties in Cuba does not come as a surprise. The word on the streets of Havana has been nothing else but that for months. In fact, his brother Raúl has been in real power since Fidel passed the baton to him in July 2006. Read more
Posted: 03:55 PM ET, 02/15/08Last week, I escaped the Northeast winter. The trip lasted only for four days, coinciding with my wife’s journey to a seven-day stay at a West Coast spa, but I managed to squeeze in 90 holes of golf. Do the math. Two travel days took away two half days of golf, so we only managed 18 holes on Thursday and Sunday. Read more
Posted: 12:40 PM ET, 02/15/08It was a cool trip to Cuba. I am back at home in Italy at the moment and posting my last video blog from the island. And I am sorry I left. There is so much to see and learn there, especially for a cigar smoker.
I hope you have enjoyed the blogging and got as much out of it as I did. Read more
Posted: 01:59 PM ET, 02/13/08Like I didn’t have enough heavy food already after lunch with tobacco maestro Alejandro Robania. But the day after my visit to his plantation, I went to lunch with some friends at a big outdoor restaurant called El Palenque in the Siboney neighborhood of Havana. Read more
Posted: 11:39 AM ET, 02/13/08Just to give you an idea of what the tobacco looks like going in the barns, check out this latest video. It’s awesome. Hiroshi Robaina, the grandson of tobacco guru Alejandro Robaina, took me for a walk through their three tobacco curing barns and I was speechless. Read more
Posted: 02:14 PM ET, 02/12/08It wasn’t the first time that I smoked a “foreign cigar” with Alejandro Robaina, the great tobacco grower from Cuba’s Pinar del Río region. Alejandro is a curious man for 89-year-old and he’s always interested to try cigars from other areas in the world. Read more
Posted: 10:17 AM ET, 02/11/08The tobacco in Robaina's fields looked so good last week. It was bright green, large sized, clean, and ripe. Hiroshi Robaina, 32, the grandson of the legendary tobacco grower Alejandro Romania, said that it was the best tobacco the family had seen in their fields in the last 15 years. Read more
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