Cigars & Cuba: 50 Years of History, pg. 2

Alejandro Robaina, center, is the godfather of Cuban cigars. His son, Carlos, left, and grandson, Hiroshi, right, continue to work the farm in San Luis where Robainas have grown cigar tobacco for many decades.

Posted: March 26, 2009

The fundamental difference in growing tobacco and making cigars now compared to 50 years ago is that the government controls or owns everything. "It's very simple," says Hiroshi Robaina, the grandson of Alejandro who has been managing the family-owned property on his own for the last three harvests. "We have one client, and we have one place to buy everything. At least prices are up three to 10 times in the last few years for good tobacco."

According to Daniel Solana, a former vice minister of agriculture and head of Cubatabaco, a governmental organization that once oversaw the entire production of cigars on the island, more than 100,000 farmers and their families plant tobacco each year in Cuba and most are members of cooperatives, which band together for financing, agricultural supplies and knowledge, and sales of leaf tobacco. Solana is retired, but he has lived through the changes in the country's cigar industry, and believes it has never been better.

"It's a total change [from 50 years ago]," says Solana. "The farmers grow their own tobacco, and in the final stage, when the tobacco is totally dry in the curing barn, the government buys this tobacco. This tobacco goes through processing and selection in the government warehouses and then is shipped in bales to the factories."

He said that the change occurred in the early 1960s when the revolutionary government created Cubatabaco, which was primarily in charge of cigar and cigarette production on the island as well as retail distribution of tobacco products and matches. The organization controlled more than 100 cigar factories that had been nationalized a few years earlier, when small independent rollers or factories (called chinchalles) were phased out. Meanwhile, tobacco farming was centralized under the National Institute of Agrarian Reform. The names of the organizations have changed, but essentially the system works in the same way today, with the government controlling tobacco growing and cigar production.

In the late 1960s, the government moved to include more women in producing cigars under the so-called plan tabaquera, Solana says. Until the revolution, women accounted for only about 5 percent of the workforce. So Cubatabaco, under direct order of Castro, organized a program to teach women how to roll cigars as well as learn tobacco processing. One of the schools later became the home of Cohiba and Davidoff. El Laguito, which is in the Havana suburb of Siboney, remains the "mother factory" for Cohiba, overseeing all the production for Cuba's most prestigious brand.

"This plan was a total success," says Solana. "About 10,000 women were hired to take part in this plan. Each municipality in Havana had one training center where the women were taught how to roll cigars. This also served the purpose of creating a workforce that could in time replace the old cigar rollers. The women rolled cigars with the same level of quality that men rollers produced, and new job opportunities were made available to women. This plan was later extended to the rest of the country . . . . Nowadays the ratio has changed significantly: 65 percent of the rollers are women and only 35 are men."

The biggest change for cigar production after the revolution was the end of the export of premium tobacco in bales because of the U.S. trade embargo imposed in February 1962. "Before the revolution the best wrapper and filler tobacco from the best farms went directly and only to the United States," Solana adds. "The cigars were then rolled in the United States. They were rolled in Tampa [and Trenton, New Jersey]. The statistics show what I am saying. We have never again exported, after the revolution, any wrapper or filler tobacco [to the United States]. All the filler tobacco grown in the Vuelta Abajo stays in Cuba. None of it is exported; so it has been for 50 years . . . . That means the best quality tobacco for Cuba."

The newly established state-run cigar business went into full swing in the early 1960s. The government realized that cigars could be a steady source of foreign currency for the social and political programs of the fledgling communist state. Some people believed that Castro, who at the time was a keen cigar smoker himself, had the idea to produce one single brand instead of the dozens of names from Partagas to Sancho Panza, but Solana strongly refutes this. "This is not true at all," he says. "It was totally the opposite. We had clear instructions from Fidel to continue to create new brands for export cigars."

However, the loss of the U.S. market, both for rolled cigars and leaf tobacco, drove the new government to create a strategy for selling the country's premium black tobacco. According to Jean Stubbs in her book Tobacco on the Periphery: A Case Study in Cuban Labour History, l860-1958, "The cigar export industry had been particularly badly hit by the U.S. embargo, given that (on 1958 figures) over two-thirds of the volume of leaf exports [and] half the volume of cigar exports—even higher proportions in terms of values—were accounted by the U.S. market."

There was also a brain drain from the island as many educated Cubans left their homeland. Many of the key people in the cigar trade in Cuba migrated by the time the embargo had been imposed. Benjamin Menendez left slightly before then, but he remembers his cigar factory, H. Upmann, being nationalized, and the loss of knowledgeable and experienced people in the cigar trade in Havana. "The government was not ready for it," says Menendez, who after leaving Cuba produced cigars in the Canary Islands and Brazil before working for Altadis U.S.A. Inc. and General Cigar Co. He still consults with the latter. "They didn't have the contacts. The first echelon walked out."

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