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CUBAN CIGAR HISTORY
Nobody really knows when tobacco was first grown nor smoked, but it is almost certain that the inhabitants of Europe were unaware of tobacco until after Columbus' epic voyage of 1492.
Two of his sailors reported that the Indians on the Cuban island smoked a primitive form of cigar. A type of cigar with twisted, dried tobacco leaves rolled in other leaves such as palm or plantain. Spanish and other European sailors quickly caught the habit, as did the Conquistadors, and smoking Cuban cigars spread to Spain and Portugal and eventually France where Jean Nicot, the French ambassador to Portugal gave his name to nicotine. Later, smoking tobacco spread to Italy and, after Sir Walter Raleigh's voyages to America, the habit came to Britain.
By the mid 16th century smoking tobacco was familiar throughout Europe (in pipes in Britain) and half a century later, tobacco started to be grown commercially in America. Tobacco was originally thought to have medicinal qualities, but there were already some who considered it evil and it was denounced by Philip II of Spain, and James I of England.
The word cigar originated from the Mayan word for smoking "sikar", which became "cigarro" in Spanish, although the word itself, and variations on it, did not come into general use until the mid 18th century.
cigars, more or less in the form that we know them today, were first made in Spain in the early 18th century, using Cuban tobacco leaves. At that time, no cigars were exported from Cuba.
By 1790, manufacturing cigars had spread north of the Pyrenees, with small cigar factories being set up in France and Germany.
Holland, started making cigars using tobacco from their Far Eastern colonies. But cigar smoking only became a widespread custom in France and Britain after the Peninsular War (1808-14), when returning British and French veterans made fashionable the habit of smoking they had learned while serving in Spain.
Production of "segars" began in Britain in 1820, and in 1821 an Act of Parliament was needed to set out regulations governing their production. Because of the import tax, foreign cigars in Britain were already regarded as a luxury item.
Soon there was a demand for higher quality cigars in Europe, and Spanish cigars were superseded by those made in Cuba, which was then a Spanish colony, where Cuban cigar production had started during the mid 18th century. cigars, European smokers discovered, traveled better than tobacco. The cigar probably arrived in North America in 1762, when Israel Putnam, later an American general in the War of Independence (1774-1778), returned from Cuba, where he had served in the British army. He came back to his home in Connecticut, where tobacco had been grown by settlers since the 17th century, with a selection of Habano cigars and large amounts of Cuban tobacco seed. Cigar factories were later set up in the Connecticut area, processing the tobacco grown from the Cuban cigar seed. In the early 19th century American domestic production started to take off and Cuban cigars also began to be imported in significant numbers. But smoking Cuban cigars did not really boom in the United States until around the time of the Civil War in the 1860's, with individual brands emerging by the late 19th century. By then the Cuban cigar had become a status symbol in the United States.
During the same period, Cuban cigar smoking had become so popular among gentlemen in Britain and France that European trains introduced smoking cars to accommodate them, and hotels and clubs boasted smoking rooms. The after-dinner cigar, accompanied by glasses of port or brandy, also became a tradition. This ritual was given an added boost by the fact that the Prince of Wales, the future Edward VII and a leader of fashion, was a devotee, much to the annoyance of his mother, Queen Victoria, who disliked smoking.
Cigarettes, or paper cigars, first appeared on the scene in the early 19th century as a cheap alternative to Cuban cigars. The introduction of cigarette-making machines, in the 1880s, accelerated the growth in popularity of this form of smoking, which had become dominant by World War I.
As a response, the production of machine-made Cuban cigars began in Cuba in the 1920s, after which both the manufacture and smoking of handmade Cuban cigars fell into a slow but steady decline.
Smoking in general has, of course, become much less popular since the publication of the American Surgeon General's report on its effects on health in the early 1960s. But since the early 1990s, there has been a major revival in the popularity of handmade Cuban cigars: they have become chic once more, thanks to the enthusiasm shown for them by stars, such as Arnold Schwarzenegger, James Woods, Jack Nicholson, Sharon Stone, Demi Moore and model Linda Evangelista, demonstrating that, among the rich and famous, Cuban cigars are just as popular as ever.