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The Stogie Diaspora: How Revolution And Embargo Created Today's Cigar Industry

by chiron99

Among cigar smokers, it is always just "the embargo." After all,
though governments declare trade and other kinds of embargoes for
various reasons all the time, no other such order has so affected
the lives of those who smoke cigars as has the United States'
trade embargo against Cuba, created by executive order by John F.
Kennedy in 1962 and in force ever since.

At the time, Cuba was the world's undisputed cigar capital,
thanks both to the uniquely fine tobacco of its Vuelta Abajo
district and its history as the first place where many Western
explorers and colonists encountered the ancient ritual of rolled
tobacco-leaf smoking. As a matter of fact, though, that "cigar
capital" status is increasingly being challenged by offerings
from Honduras, Nicaragua, and the Dominican Republic - a fact
that itself relates to our initial subject, The Embargo.

The trade embargo, banning imports to and exports from Cuba, is
doubly ironic. After all, the two countries had enjoyed close
trade relations for years; indeed, Cuba's political and economic
ties to the United States were seen as one reason for the
latter's willingness to go to war, in 1898, to secure the smaller
island nation's freedom from colonial Spain - a "freedom" that,
as many observers then and now have pointed out, was sharply
limited by Cuba's utter dependence on the US.

With the larger country accounting for a whopping percentage of
the island's exports (eighty-two percent as of 1877) and making
periodic attempts at seizing Cuba for itself throughout the
nineteenth century (the most famous being the 1854 Ostend
Manifesto), it's widely thought that Cuba, by accepting the
assistance of its neighbor to the north in its struggle for
independence, merely exchanged one kind of colonialism for
another, slightly less obvious version. (Indeed, the guns had
barely stopped firing when a US-owned company began offering
Americans Cuban land; and US troops only left the country when
its leaders agreed to accept the Platt Amendment, which
stipulated the US's right to intervene in the Cuban economy and
political process as desired.) Whether you think that Cuban-US
relations prior to 1959 were domineering, neo-colonialist, or
just rather cozy, the Cuban revolution of 1959 put an end to that
longstanding friendship.

The other major irony is that, according to aide Pierre
Salinger, President Kennedy made a point of purchasing 1200 H.
Upmann cigars the night before the embargo began. (Salinger
himself was dispatched to make the purchase.) The trade embargo,
in other words, was signed into law by a man who was himself no
stranger to the taste of a fine Cuban cigar.

But that's not the end of the story - and here it becomes doubly
ironic again. As the embargo outlasted generations of activist
efforts to change it (it even became federal law thanks to the
1992 Cuban Democracy Act and the 1996 Helms-Burton Act), even
surviving the frequently-expressed criticism that it merely
strengthens Castro while preventing needed aid from reaching
ordinary poor Cubans (even staunch conservative George Schultz,
who was Ronald Reagan's secretary of state, has called the
embargo "insane"), the Cuban cigar industry has been challenged,
and some might even say eclipsed, by cigar makers in neighboring
countries.

In what we might call the Stogie Diaspora, some of Cuba's
best-regarded, longest-established cigar-making families fled the
country during any of the several waves of emigration that have
punctuated Castro's reign. Nicaragua, the Dominican Republic, and
Honduras have absorbed an especially high number of these
once-Cuban powerhouses. These immigrants have flourished in their
new homes, to the point where cigars from these countries
routinely top international rankings.

Though a Cuban cigar remains a peak memory for many dedicated
cigar smokers, the expertise of these Castro-evading expatriates
has allowed these countries' cigar industries to attract some of
the prestige that once attached only to their island neighbor.
For example, Nicaragua's importance as a source of cigars is so
established that its cigar industry has managed to survive not
only the Sandinista-era decision to turn the country's tobacco
crop to cigarette tobacco (which was thankfully reversed in the
early 1990s), but, more importantly, the utterly disastrous
Hurricane Mitch, which left thirty percent of the country's
infrastructure standing.

Adding insult, perhaps, to injury, many of these same countries
have benefited from the assistance of Castro's Cuba over the
years. In Honduras, for example, the two countries' history of
cooperation allowed the Hondurans to learn tobacco cultivation
from the experts (some of whom then decided to remain in country
permanently!).

<a href="http://www.cigarfox.com">CigarFox</a> provides you the
opportunity to build your own sampler of the finest cigars that
include cigar brands like Montecristo, Romeo & Julieta, H Upmann,
Macanudo, Cohiba, Partagas, Gurkha and many more. Choose from
more than 1200 different cigars! Other cigar products include
cigar humidors, cigar boxes, and cigar accessories like Zippo
Lighters.

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