• Home
• About

Subscribe

Cigar History Destinations: Florida

Cigars have been with us for thousands of years - far too long for any historian, however dedicated, to trace. Tobacco may have grown on this planet (according to current speculation by paleontologists) for as long as eight thousand years, and archaeological data suggests it’s been smoked for at least four thousand. Ancient pottery unearthed in present-day Guatemala shows us a man smoking tobacco through a tube made from dried leaves - AKA, a cigar, tenth-century style.

And of course it was this method of smoking tobacco that Europeans learned to use when they “discovered” tobacco. On October 28, 1492, two of Columbus’s sailors were exploring the area now known as Cuba when they witnessed natives of the area inhaling tobacco in the same way as depicted on that Guatemalan jar - through a dried-leaf tube. In the natives’ language, the smoked portions were called cohiba (now the name of a successful cigar brand) and the tube, tobacco. In misunderstanding sailors called the smokable plant itself tobacco, and thus an industry, a hobby, an entire culture was born.

With such an ancient lineage, the cigar has left its imprint on history - so it’s no surprise that the attentive traveler, visiting parts of the southern United States and Central and South America, will discover all sorts of historic landmarks that have some connection to the history of tobacco farming and smoking on these shores. Here are some places that a reverent cigar smoker might decide to visit - if she or he wanted to see, firsthand, the ash-like traces that the cigar has left on the history of the United States.

In Florida, there’s Key West - long a bastion of cigar culture. In its prime, the Key West cigar industry was among the largest in the world, with more cigar factories per capita than any other city. As with many centers of cigar production - Honduras and the Dominican Republic come to mind - this one owed its dominance, in part, to unfortunate conditions elsewhere. In the 1860s and 1870s, Cubans fled their native country to escape the civil war between Cuba and Spain, much as they would later flee (in the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s) to avoid the Castro regime, making other Latin American countries (Nicaragua, Dominican Republic, Honduras) into cigar powerhouses rivaling Cuba. In this case, what had been before 1868 a little town - no more than five hundred people - suddenly became a large city, and an important one, thanks to Cuban

Comments