Viva La Cuba

Celebrating the Cohiba’s cult status—the storied stogie that took Cuba’s Fidel Castro and the world by storm.

- SHANKER GANGADHAR

One Caribbean day some time in the 1960s, Fidel Castro ran out of cigars while driving around Havana in his Oldsmobile. No problem. His bodyguard and fellow revolutionary Chicho offered him one from his own stock. Rolled by another revolutionary named Eduardo Rivera, it was a fuma. The fuma, which means ‘smoke’ in Spanish, was more than just a smoke: it was a proletarian allegory symbolised by the thin cigars, which impecunious torcedores produced using leftover tobacco from premium cigars. They could take home all the fumas that could fit in their guayabera pockets. Their strong pastoral flavours—earthy, spicy, grassy, floral, herbal and cocoa—appealed to Castro. He smoked them by the dozen. He also distributed them to friends such as Che Guevara who loved them as much as he loved to shoot the bourgeoisie in prison yards. The growing demand convinced Castro to set up a professional cigar factory headed by Eduardo. His personal secretary, Celia Sánchez aka the ‘Flower of the Revolution’ asked Eduardo who made the best torcedores, “men or women?” The reply was, “women of course, because they are more meticulous and careful.” And Cohiba became a metaphor of the Cuban revolution—the Flower personally chose the daughters and relatives of Castro’s fighters for the first batch of employees. In 1964, the first Cohiba (then named Laguito) literally rolled out of its eponymous factory in Havana based in a pre-revolution royal mansion appropriated by the state—a clandestine site reflecting communist paranoia. . It was Celia who christened the cigar ‘Cohiba’ in 1966; the word describes the roll of dry tobacco leaves, which the indigenous Taino Indians smoke in their rituals. The brand was officially registered in 1969.