Antonio and I try to leave Cojimar and head into the center of Havana at least every other day. He lives about a two-minute drive from my place, and drives over to pick me up at 10:00 AM every Monday. When he drops me off back home at the end of the day, we have a short talk about where I want to go that week and what days I plan to be out. He’ll usually double tap his right temple with his index finger to indicate that he has recorded it all in his memory. I like Antonio. He was the former president of a Cuban tobacco distribution company, and spent the last eight years in Canada before retiring back in Havana. The company he worked for sent him to over forty countries in his thirty-year career with them, and over that span of time, he has picked up some key phrases in more than twelve languages. While we could easily have all of our conversations in English, Antonio appreciates that I, an American, speak fluent Spanish, a fact he eagerly shares with whoever is in earshot of us. Antonio is around my father’s age, and I think he has taken a liking to me because I’m the same age as a son of his that has recently moved to Miami. It doesn’t hurt our rapport that I genuinely enjoy listening to his stories, and happily splurge and treat him to a can or two of Sprite whenever we are in the more touristy areas of Havana.
Antonio was the driver my Airbnb host set me up with when I landed at Jose Marti Airport. We did the usual tourist tour of Old Havana and went to a few of Hemingway’s favorite watering holes that first week. We also frequented a lot of tobacco shops. Antonio would drop me off at an office or space I wanted to explore and point me in the direction of the nearest tobacco shop where we would later rendezvous. After my business was taken care of, I would make my way back to the shop where I would usually find him sitting in the most comfortable chair, entertaining a group of people with stories and laughter while puffing on a Romeo and Julieta, his cigar brand of preference. He would quickly yell out a “there she is” when he noticed me sheepishly making my way toward his group, and follow that up by telling everyone I was his favorite fare and ask me if I was ready to go. Seeing how much he was enjoying his conversation and cigar, I would wave the thought away and say we should stay for another few minutes, offering that it would give me a chance to cool off in one of the air-conditioned smoke parlors. I would then usually wander around the shop, looking through the walls of cigars and opening up the humidors that were for sale, wondering how much they would go for on Etsy. At the nicer, larger shops, someone would offer me a cortado or a bottle of water that I would always accept and drink while listening in on Antonio’s conversation. By the end of my stay in Cuba, some shops knew how I took my coffee–no milk but with a generous spoonful of sugar. I grew to look forward to this part of our day, and by about our sixth tobacco shop visit, I asked Antonio if there was any way we could go on a tour of a tobacco factory before I left for the States. He responded with the chortle that I had come to interpret as approval, and said he would reach out to his old tobacco contacts and see if he could make it happen. Three weeks of phone calls and a few favors called in later, and I was waking up before our 10:00 AM slot to go to the tobacco factory.
. . .after the Revolution, more and more women were hired to as torcedoras to roll the cigars, a position that had previously been exclusively filled by men.”
Yes, Antonio has long-standing tobacco contacts, but it wasn’t as easy as simply calling up and saying we would be showing up to the factory to permit us entry. I was informed that just a few weeks prior, Robert De Niro had dropped in on one of the factories on the island asking for a tour, and had had to wait a few hours before getting clearance. I’m not sure how true or not this story was, but the fact that I was given the VIP treatment and allowed free reign to open every door and look in each room of the factory in Havana, I must admit, made me feel a little A-list adjacent—maybe not Oscar award-winning, but Emmy-nominated at the very least. By 8:00 AM that morning we had picked up Antonio’s friend Lalo (who was going to get us through the front doors), and purchased a bottle of rum for the factory’s supervisor in order to grease the wheels. After handing over the bottle, shaking a few hands, and impressing a room full of supervisors and foremen with my Spanish, a woman named Teresa took me up the side stairs to start the tour. She was one of many women working there. Most of the factory workers, in fact, were women. I learned that, after the Revolution, more and more women were hired to as torcedoras to roll the cigars, a position that had previously been exclusively filled by men. Today, they make up close to 85% of the all cigar rollers in Cuba.
Our first stop was the room where the mostly women workers prepare the tobacco leaves. Before that, they are hung in a glass room where the water was allowed to drip down, evenly coating each leaf. From there, the leaves are taken to the floor where women worked furiously at separating the main vein from each leaf and neatly folding them into a box, over and over again, hundreds of times a day. The quality control at the factory is intense. Each leaf is individually claimed and accounted for, and each cigar can be traced back to the individual who packed, separated, or rolled it. Noticing one particularly skilled woman quickly working through her stack of leaves, I asked her how many leaves she thought she de-veined each day. She said each woman was responsible for anywhere between five hundred to a thousand leaves. I half jokingly asked how many the five men all lined up together in the back were expected to prepare. She quickly flashed me a grin and loudly said to never have expectations of men because you’ll always be disappointed. She proceeded to give me a wink and blow a kiss in their direction. This was clearly not the first time she had used this one-liner.
Teresa didn’t give me time to react, and quickly guided me up to the next floor, through the factory dining hall to the training hall where students enroll in a nine-month course that teaches them how to properly roll cigars. Those seated closest to the front were considered the more experienced rollers while those in the back were just starting to learn the trade. I tried to be as discreet as possible while I took a look around, peering into each cubicle-style wooden desk to see what everyone was doing. Each workstation was equipped with the same ancient-looking contraception that holds and compresses the cigars with even weight for about twenty minutes. After that, the cigars are placed in a box and taken to a pressurizer for quality inspection to ensure that the leaves hold together without being too tightly rolled. I learned that if the cigar is rolled too tightly, it will not stay lit, but if it is rolled too loosely, not enough smoke will hit your palate. Those that do not pass the test are returned to their roller.
After indulging me by allowing me to test out the pressurizer firsthand, Teresa went back to her office and handed me off to Leo, the galera supervisor that guided me through the rest of the tour. In the second hall, I finally met the owner of the disembodied voice that had been coming out of loudspeakers, distracting me with its loud, almost robotic sound throughout the entire visit. An older woman was seated behind a desk reading from a Cuban newspaper. The tradition of having a lecturer read a book, magazine, newspaper, etc. to the workers goes back to the days before the Revolution. From her podium, she read something or other to the room full of workers all day long to keep their spirits high and entertained as they went through their rolling duties. At this point, we were in the gallery with the more experienced rollers. I walked around carefully so as not to not knock over one of the large bins filled with tobacco leaf refuse that would go to the cigarette factories. Leo introduced me to the top, highest-paid rollers in charge of the longer and more intricate cigars that Leo, himself kept puffing on despite the posted signs that read “no smoking.” This hall was alive with a completely different kind of energy. While the newer rollers barely spoke above a whisper, these veterans loudly chatted over the lecturer and each other while also listening to music from their phones at full volume and trying to subtly smoke their cigarettes, a puff serving as a reward for a nicely rolled cigar.
He neatly arranged his new cigars in the center console, and asked me how I had liked the factoria de caramelos – ‘the candy factory.'”
From the galera, Leo ushered me downstairs to the air-conditioned hall where the ring gauges are placed on each cigar after they have been separated by color and cigar length. Every morning, the factory mixes a flour and water concoction in a large drum to make the vegetable glue used to adhere the ring gauges to the cigars. This last stop marked the end of the official tour. Leo returned to his desk, and I was allowed to roam around freely by myself. By this point, I had figured out that the same tobacco is used for every single Cuban cigar, and that the price difference is set by the quality of the roll and the length and size of the cigar. I really wish I had known this before stocking up on the more expensive Cohiba-brand cigars that everyone back home had requested as a souvenir from my time in Cuba. When I finally caught up with Antonio, I noticed that he had about a half dozen loose cigars in his back pocket. Back in the car, we rolled down the windows to let the hot air escape while waiting for the air conditioning to kick in. He neatly arranged his new cigars in the center console, and asked me how I had liked the factoria de caramelos – “the candy factory.” I knew he relished my interest in something he was so passionate about and had dedicated half his life to. Antonio relit the cigar he had been puffing on earlier, and proceeded to shift into first to pull out onto the main road. We were just about to enter the tunnel that separated Cojimar from Old Havana when it dawned on me to ask him if he had enjoyed his time at the factory. Antonio kept his eyes on the road, and I noticed his mouth curl up into a tight grimace. He lamented that they had only given him six cigars. It was a sign that he had been out of the tobacco game for a while.
All images by Elix Colón.