Maybe someone was having a quiet joke. Perhaps it was a coincidence. But for one reason or another, Havana’s Karl Marx theatre was the setting for the inaugural night of celebrations in honor of that great capitalist prop, the hand-rolled cigar. The visitors, more likely to be socialites than socialists, come every year to rub shoulders with like-minded aficionados. And smoke, almost continuously. With many countries around the world now shunning smokers, Cuba, which has not enforced its own anti-smoking legislation, has become something of a haven. “We have been driven to special corners of the world,” says Hong Kong based cigar distributor David Tang. “Places where people still understand that smoking is not a sin.” Visitors to the fair spend much of the week touring the factories where the objects of their desires are rolled. For British designer and restaurateur Sir Terence Conran coming to Cuba for the first time having smoked Cuban cigars almost every day for the last 43 of his 75 years, is like a pilgrimage. In the vast rolling room of H Uppman, the air thick with the aroma of tobacco leaf, he recalls his first cigar.
The week ends with an extravagant $500 a head final dinner, which this year was held in the cavernous ExpoCuba, near Havana’s Parque Lenin. Glancing around the several guests, it seemed quite clear that there are plenty of cigar smokers with plenty of money around the world. The dinner ends with an auction of hand-crafted humidors. The bids (which go towards Cuban health care) soar into the hundreds of thousands of dollars. This does not look like a business, or a habit that is dying out. |
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| Full article in 2008/9 edition of Cuba Absolutely |
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