The largest island in the Caribbean, located at the entrance to the Gulf of Mexico. It was on Cuba that Columbus first heard of people smoking, although he had already been presented with dried tobacco leaves, which he did not know how to use, on San Salvador.

 

        The Taino Indians, members of the Aruakos tribe who lived on Cuba, Puerto Rico and Hispaniola, cultivated tobacco and had developed drying and manipulation techniques for the preparation of chewing tobacco, snuff, cigars and a form of cigarette wrapped in leaves.  The Taino are known to have mixed coca leaves in with chewing tobacco, a practice learned from South and Central American Indians.

 

    Cuba is rightly renowned for its cigar tobacco. Most famous is that from the Vuelta Abajo in the Pinar del Rio region of Western Cuba.  The Vuelta was first planted in the 1700’s, but was greatly expanded in the second quarter of the 19th century when demand for Cuban tobacco skyrocketed throughout Europe and the US.  Vuelta Abajo tobacco is the standard against which all other cigar tobaccos are measured. Tobacco from this and other regions of Cuba provided the original seed from which nearly all modern cigar tobaccos have been developed.

 

    Prior to 1800, small family operations on farms or scattered in tiny towns supplied cigars to local residents, with only one maker permitted in the late 1790’s to ship directly to Spain (variously reported as late as 1810). For the first fifty years after Spain opened Cuba’s doors to limited trade in the early 1800’s, the number of tobacco farms and cigar factories in Cuba rose dramatically. The number of farms kept growing. Factories tended to be short lived, due to attrition, absorption or mismanagement.  

 

 

    The entire 19th century in Cuba witnessed continual, seldom overly popular, frequently bloody, uprisings against Spanish control.  As a result, both Cuban Spaniards and Cuban creoles (mixed bloods of Spanish, Indian, Black, European and Caribbean backgrounds) often moved to the United States, settling primarily in New York, New Orleans, Philadelphia and Key West, four cities reachable by commercial shiplines.  

 

 

        Cuba’s devastating 10 years war (1868-78) nearly destroyed the island physically and economically with some estimates claiming 25% of the male population dead.  Skilled cigar makers and factory managers had yet another reason to flee northward, primarily to New York City during the great expansion of US cigar factories which began in the late 1870’s. Cuban refugees also went to Mexico, South America and Europe, carrying techniques and procedures of Cuban cigar making throughout the world.

 

 

To this day, Cubans smoke half their output.

 

    The Cuban cigarette industry was thriving by the mid 1800’s. Very short hand rolled cigarettes, frequently made of scraps of high grade cigar tobacco, were extremely popular with the total output split 50-50 between local consumption and export. Europe and South America were the biggest customers.  The largest and most famous of Cuban 19th century cigarette makers was La Honradez, the subject of books and articles in Europe and a popular tourist stop for visitors to Cuba during the second half of the 19th century.  

 

        Honradez is credited with creating the earliest tobacco item designed to be a collectible in the 1850’s when they began wrapping each pack of 10-20 cigarettes in colorful cartoon wrappers featuring jokes, fables, uniforms, moral lessons, famous people and of course, pretty girls. The frequent changing of labels was an effort to thwart European pirate wholesalers and retailers who were marketing fake Honradez cigarettes. Honradez was a target of forgers because their cigarettes were regarded as the world’s finest and cost three times what domestic cigarettes cost worldwide. In the 20th century the Cuban cigarette industry focused on domestic markets as it was not in a position to compete against the marketing power of American, British and French cigarette conglomerates.