By Jean Stubbs
It was in was in the late 1960s when I first went to Cuba, drawn by the history of Cuban tobacco and tobacco workers as well as its young revolution. For years I delved deeper into how those working in tobacco agriculture and industry experienced change under colonialism, independence and revolution, influenced though never entirely convinced by the classic Cuban Counterpoint of Tobacco and Sugar by Cuban ethnographer Fernando Ortiz.
Then, in the 1990s, the global cigar revival amidst crisis in Cuba – triggered by the fall of the Soviet Union, Cuba’s main trading partner at the time, and the tightening noose of the US embargo – pushed me to zigzag my way around exploring how El Habano, Cuba’s luxury hand-rolled Havana cigar, was catapulted to new global prominence.
Given today’s global smoking bans, it is ironic that El Habano again became pivotal for Cuba, fashioning familiar stories with a new twist. Cuba’s tobacco leaf sector spearheaded a renewed emphasis on small farms, and quality cigar hand-rollers travelled the world demonstrating their craft. I have never smoked, but a photo of me travelled the world looking as if I was smoking a cigar.
I was hooked on a journey toward a new counterpoint of Cuban tobacco on and off the island, exploring how the Havana Cigar had become so coveted in so many places around the world, from its ‘coming of age’ in the nineteenth-century ‘age of the cigar’ to the whole new twenty-first-century Havana cigar universe, with often identical parallel, disputed brands, produced in Cuba and abroad.
Amaurea’s new editions of my early monograph Tobacco on the Periphery and forthcoming Tobacco Counterpoint, the edited collection of my disparate and dispersed tobacco publications since, are milestones in my journey, and my journey isn’t over yet…
