Tobacco is native to the Americas, and so is the practice of burning its leaves and drawing in the smoke. Europeans adopted the practice only after 1492.
Tobacco before the factory
Indigenous peoples of the Caribbean and the North American mainland grew tobacco and smoked it in rolls, pipes of their own design long before the Spanish arrived. Columbus’s crew noted islanders smoking burning leaves. The Spanish took tobacco seed and the smoking habit back across the Atlantic. For a long time, the cigar was not a luxury item with named sizes. It was a farm product, rolled only where the tobacco was grown.
Cuba became the island most closely linked to manufactured cigars. The western part of the island, Pinar del Río and later the famous Vuelta Abajo region, had the climate and soil that farmers and buyers came to trust. By the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Havana was a factory town as well as a port. Cigars were shipped from there as branded goods in cedar boxes, and some of those brand names are still in use today.
The United States was first a customer and then a manufacturer. Cuban tobacco, along with Cuban and Spanish cigar rollers, crossed the Florida Strait. Key West had factories. In the late nineteenth century, Tampa, especially Ybor City and West Tampa, became a major cigar city, with companies making cigars for the American market from Cuban tobacco. Cigars were handmade, but they were also an industrial product: workers sat at rows of benches, some factories employed a reader to read books aloud to the rollers.
Cuba as the standard
Until the middle of the twentieth century, many Americans and Europeans used the word “cigar” to mean a Cuban cigar, or a cigar meant to taste like one. Cuba had the seed, the farms, the factories, and the export brands. The Churchill and the corona were Cuban factory sizes before they became popular names. Winston Churchill’s cigar habit, which began on a visit to Cuba in 1895, is a famous example of Cuban cigars’ wider appeal.
The Cuban cigar industry that Americans had known changed with the 1959 revolution. Cuba nationalized the cigar industry. Families that had owned farms, factories and well-known cigar brands either left or stayed and worked for the state. Some brand owners left and relaunched cigar businesses outside of Cuba, and thus why we see some brands now with two versions (and two owners), much as some rum brands did: one version of the brand stayed in Cuba, another was made by the family in exile. This situation would later lead to legal court battles over brand name ownership. Those battles continue to this day.
The embargo and the new cigar-making countries
The United States ended legal trade with Cuba in stages, and in 1962 it put in place the embargo that has lasted. The embargo removed Cuban cigars from American shops, but the people who had left Cuba still had their skills. Many also took tobacco seed with them. What the trade now calls cuban seed tobacco comes from plants descended from Cuban seed but grown in other countries.
Florida was the first place these cigar makers settled. José Orlando Padrón started his company in Miami in 1964. The Fuente family was already in Tampa, growing a small home-based operation into a company that used up its remaining supply of Cuban tobacco and then had to find other sources. Nicaragua, Honduras, and the Dominican Republic already grew tobacco, and they became the countries that U.S. cigar makers looked to.
This is how the so-called New World cigar industry that Americans know today developed. Estelí grew into a major factory city in Nicaragua, and Santiago de los Caballeros did the same in the Dominican Republic. Danlí in Honduras took in companies that needed a place to work while Nicaragua was at war.
Cuba still makes cigars for the rest of the world, and the United States still does not legally import them. The important historical point is not which side makes the “real” cigar. Both sides make the same kind of product from closely related plants, and the non-Cuban industry is now old enough to be now run by its third generation.
For how cigars are made, see how cigars are made. For the split between the two industries after 1962, see Cuban vs New World. For two companies that were founded as a result of that split, see Padrón and Arturo Fuente.
Names, sizes, and language
By the time sizes such as the Churchill and the corona had become standard, cigars were already a common consumer product in Europe and North America. Spanish is still the language of the factory floor, with words such as capa, capote, tripa, vitola, and puro. English is the language of the shop. That is why the glossary on this site includes terms from both languages. The cigar itself changed its country of origin less often than its customers did.
During the twentieth century, machine-made cigars and similar products took over much of the volume that factories once produced by hand. The premium handmade cigar that survived, which is the subject of this book, is a smaller trade: fewer cigars, more expensive tobacco, and more time spent fermenting the leaf.
Sources: Standard public histories of Caribbean tobacco and the Cuban industry; U.S. embargo chronology; manufacturer histories from Padrón and Arturo Fuente.