The Internet Travel Guide "Getting to Know Cuba"

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Cigar Manufacturing

The climate in the area between Pinar del Rio, San Luis and San Juan y Martinez is perfect for cultivating tobacco. The world's finest and most expensive tobacco, called Vuelta Abajo, is grown there. After the revolution, more or less independent small farmers, who are called vegueros, have cultivated these tobacco fields. In September and October they sow, and in November they set the seedlings. As tobacco is quite sensitive, the farmers use gauze to give shelter against the aggressive sun, storms and insects. Compared to other tropical plants, tobacco seems to need almost constant care. There is a Cuban proverb saying that you cannot simply seed tobacco, you will have to marry it.

Tobacco plants

After three months of the most careful attention, you can begin to harvest. The leaves are picked one by one and dried in bunches at places called casas de tabaco. After the tobacco harvest, the cooperatives come to buy the whole quantity of tobacco leaves.

Huge bunches of dried tobacco leaves are sent to the cities, where they get fermented. The girls working there are called rezagas. They extract the central vein from the moistened silk-like leaves. They sit at wooden desks, similar to classrooms, and sometimes bring along their children. Someone sitting in front tells stories or reads the newspaper aloud. After tearing off the middle vein they test the aroma, the color (they distinguish between sixty nuances in color), which defines the taste (the darker the tastier) and the combustibility. Afterwards, they sort out the leaves for the filament from the wrappers. These rezagas have to master an amount of at least one thousand leaves a day and the lathe operators have to finish two hundred cigars during an eight-hour working day. They receive an average daily salary of approximately 230 pesos, which is about USD 6.00.

Worker during tobacco harvest

Workers who do not meet the target get fired. Additionally rolled cigars may not be taken home but the workers may sell them to tourists visiting the factory. The employees testing the quality of the finished cigars are called escogedoras. An identity number in each box of finished cigars indicates the worker having rolled them. If the cigars do not match the testing requirements, they are returned to this worker, who cuts them into pieces reusing it as filament. Each cigar consists of three parts, the filament (made of rolled or cut leaves depending on the quality), the stabilizing leaf and the wrapper, the most flawless leaf. Rolling a cigar correctly is art, which needs a great deal of dexterity. The highly specialized lathe operators, the torcedores, only use three special tools for their work: the chaveta, a keen round knife to shape the leaves, the guillotine to cut the fire end straight and a pot of tasteless vegetable glue. The torcedor forms the filaments of the cigars into shape and puts some of them in a grooved box, where they are pressed for approximately 25 minutes.

Women in a cigar factory

The most difficult job is to wrap the filament with the most spotless leaves. The quality of the wrapper, its structure and flawlessness indicates the cigar's price class. The cigars are tied in bunches using thin strings and stored in a place with a constant temperature. Depending on their diameter and length, cigars are divided into the following categories: coronas, regalias, brevas, panatelas, cadates and punchenellos. A corona is a large fat standard model of a cigar. To prove the authenticity, famous brands like the Partagas, H. Upman, Montecristo, Cohiba and Romeo y Julieta for example are marked with a revenue seal, called vitola, reading "Republica de Cuba, hecho en Cuba". Finally, these precious cigars are packed in thin cedar-wooden boxes lined with tissue paper.