What This Country Needs

(2 of 2)

While tobacco was the cash crop of choice in many parts of the New World, 20th century smokers singled out Cuba as the prestige producer of quality cigars. When the U.S. placed an embargo on Castro's communist economy in 1962, the forbidden Cuban premiums took on mythical qualities. For the truly devout, the mythic Cuban cigar has a heavy and rich aromatic taste that generally milder and sweeter cigars from the Dominican Republic, Honduras and Jamaica cannot match.

Sadly, Cuban cigars fell victim over the years to socialist mismanagement. The island's wrapping handicraft declined, and its tobacco fields produced inferior leaf because they were no longer properly fertilized or allowed sufficient time to lay fallow. So uneven is the yield that two years ago, Switzerland's Davidoff company, which profited handsomely for decades from Fidel Castro's crop, pulled up its Cuban stakes.

Cigars have a tobacco "filler," an internal "binder" and an outside "wrapper." Low-priced stogies are made of chopped tobacco filler, machine wrapped with rolled sheets of pulverized leaf, water and natural gums. Around 2.3 billion machine-made cigars are sold in the United States, down from 9 billion in 1964, when Americans briefly substituted cheap cigars for cigarettes in the wake of the Surgeon General's report.

Premium cigars, unlike machine-made cigars, are constructed of whole tobacco leaf compressed by hand into the "long" filler, which is held together by whole-leaf binders and wrappers. Serious smokers debate tobacco blends and cigar construction almost as passionately as wine lovers worry about tannin content. Consolidated Cigar executive vice president Richard L. Dimeola offers some tips to the novice: if it draws too easily, it was "underfilled," and the air pockets will cause a fast burn and a hot smoke. If possible, check the cigarmaker's "leaf inventory." If the company isn't stocking enough tobacco to skip a bad harvest, its smokes will be uneven over time.

Secure as they are among their own kind, cigar worshippers must suffer in a world increasingly hostile to their habit. Even if you're smoking a good cigar, observes Dunhill executive Dickson Farrington, "you can't walk into a store in New York off the street or get into a cab. I've heard about company presidents whose wives won't let them smoke at home, so they volunteer to walk the dog." The standoff probably suits both sides. Endangered male traditions continue to endure behind closed doors, allowing the rest of the world to breathe easier.