Every cigar you light connects you to a chain of hands that stretches back more than five centuries. It begins not in a factory but in a ceremony, on an island in the Caribbean, long before Europe knew the leaf existed.
The Taino and the first cigars
When Christopher Columbus landed in the Caribbean in 1492, two of his men, Rodrigo de Jerez and Luis de Torres, were sent inland on Cuba. They returned with an account of something no European had seen: the Taino people rolling dried leaves, lighting one end and drawing the smoke.
The Taino, who lived across Cuba, Hispaniola, Puerto Rico and the Bahamas, gave tobacco a place in spiritual life. It was offered to the spirits, used by the behique, their healer and holy man, and shared in ceremonies that marked important moments in the life of a community. Cohiba, the Taino word associated with tobacco, survives today as the name of a famous cigar brand.
Tobacco was used ritually across the Americas, including among the Maya far to the west, but it was the Taino practice that the Spanish encountered first, and it was the Taino form, the rolled leaf smoked whole, that became the cigar we know.
According to the traditional account, de Jerez carried the habit home to Spain, where neighbours alarmed by the smoke pouring from his mouth reported him to the Inquisition, and he spent several years imprisoned. Whatever the precise truth of that story, by the following century smoking had spread across Spain and there was no stopping it.
Seville and the birth of an industry
Spain held tight control over Cuban tobacco for centuries. The leaf was shipped to Seville, where the first true cigar factories were established, and rolling became a recognised trade. Spanish cigars travelled with Spanish soldiers, and during the Peninsular War, British and French troops carried the habit home. The word cigar entered English from the Spanish cigarro.
In 1817, Spain ended its royal tobacco monopoly in Cuba, opening the trade on the island itself. That change moved the centre of the industry across the Atlantic, and Havana became what it remained for the next century and a half: the name that meant quality.
Cuba’s golden age
The nineteenth century built the cigar as we recognise it. The great Cuban houses were founded in this period: H. Upmann in 1844, Partagás in 1845, Romeo y Julieta in 1875. The Vuelta Abajo region in Pinar del Río, in the island’s west, became known for producing some of the finest tobacco in the world, and it still holds that reputation.
This era also gave the world the lector, the reader paid by the rollers themselves to read aloud from newspapers and novels while they worked. The Montecristo brand is said to take its name from the rollers’ love of Dumas’s The Count of Monte Cristo. The tradition continues in factories across the Caribbean today.
By the early twentieth century, a Havana cigar was a fixture of public life, from Churchill to Hollywood.
1961 and the exodus
The Cuban revolution changed everything. The Cuban government nationalised the cigar industry, and the United States imposed a trade embargo that closed the largest market for Cuban cigars. Many of the families who had built the great houses left the island.
They did not stop making cigars. They took seeds, knowledge and generations of technique with them and looked for soil that could match what they had left behind. What followed was not the end of the premium cigar but its expansion. Within a few decades, four countries, not one, were producing cigars at the highest level.
Cuba today
Cuba continues to produce cigars through its state tobacco company, Tabacuba, with Habanos S.A. handling worldwide marketing and distribution, and the Vuelta Abajo still yields extraordinary leaf. Cuban cigars remain unavailable legally in the United States, which has given them a mystique that sometimes outruns the tobacco itself. Their character is distinctive: an earthy, tangy note that smokers often call Cuban twang, the product of that specific soil and Cuba’s practice of blending tobacco grown almost entirely on the island.
The Dominican Republic
The Cibao valley, around Santiago and Villa González, became home to many exiled makers and, over the following decades, to some of the most important names in the industry. The Dominican Republic grew into the largest exporter of premium handmade cigars in the world.
Dominican tobacco tends toward the smooth and refined, with cedar, cream and nut. Dominican makers also embraced a practice that shaped the modern industry: blending tobaccos from several nations in one cigar, pairing Dominican filler with wrappers from Ecuador, Cameroon, Connecticut or elsewhere. That freedom to blend across borders is one of the biggest differences between Cuban cigars and the rest of the premium world.
Nicaragua
Nicaragua is the great success story of the past three decades. Its volcanic soil, particularly around Estelí, Jalapa and Condega in the north, produces tobacco with genuine power: pepper, earth, cocoa and a richness that rewards patient fermentation.
The industry was badly damaged by the revolution and civil conflict of the late 1970s and 1980s, when farms were seized and makers left, many for Honduras. Its recovery has been remarkable. Nicaraguan tobacco now appears in a large share of the world’s most acclaimed cigars, and for smokers who want strength and complexity, Nicaragua is often the first place they look.
Honduras
Honduras took in many makers displaced from both Cuba and Nicaragua, and the Jamastrán valley near Danlí became a centre of its industry. Honduran tobacco sits between Dominican smoothness and Nicaraguan power: full-flavoured, earthy, often with a sweet spice and a leathery depth. Some of the most respected cigars of the past forty years have come out of Honduran factories, and its growers supply leaf to blenders across the region.
What five centuries produced
The modern premium cigar is the result of every stage of that history. The Taino gave it its form. Spain gave it an industry. Cuba gave it its standard. And the exodus that followed the revolution gave it four distinct schools of tobacco instead of one, which is why a smoker today can choose between the cream of the Cibao, the fire of Estelí, the depth of Jamastrán and the tang of the Vuelta Abajo.
What has not changed is the method. A premium cigar is still made by hand, by a roller who has trained for years, from long-filler leaves laid whole inside a binder and finished with a wrapper applied in a single careful spiral. Five hundred years after two Spanish sailors walked inland on Cuba, the best cigars in the world are still made by hand, one at a time.
Frequently asked questions
Who invented the cigar?
The Indigenous peoples of the Americas were smoking tobacco long before Europeans arrived. The Taino of the Caribbean, whom Columbus’s crew encountered in 1492, smoked rolled leaves in the form that became the modern cigar.
Why did cigar making spread from Cuba?
After the Cuban cigar industry was nationalised following the revolution, many of the families who owned the great cigar houses left the island and rebuilt in the Dominican Republic, Nicaragua and Honduras.
Who makes Cuban cigars today?
Cuban cigars are produced under the state tobacco company Tabacuba. Habanos S.A. handles their marketing and distribution worldwide.
Which country makes the best cigars?
There is no single answer. Each country produces a distinct character, and preference depends on whether you favour smoothness, strength or something between.
What does long-filler mean?
Whole tobacco leaves running the length of the cigar, rather than chopped scraps. It is the defining mark of a premium handmade cigar.
Carrying the tradition forward
Baron of HAVANA cigars are made in the Dominican Republic, by hand, with long-filler tobacco, in a tradition that has passed through five centuries and four great tobacco nations. The craft is old. The name on the lid is yours.
