A Cuban cigar executive admits he drank at least four ounces of 45-proof Cuban rum shortly before his minivan struck a Toronto cyclist, but says he did not feel impaired. Jose Lugo-Alonso, 61, president of Havana House Cigars and Tobacco Merchants, took the stand in his defence Thursday. “I was not concerned because I was feeling fine and I did not notice any symptoms,” he testified through a Spanish interpreter.

The accident in July 2008 left cyclist William Crawford, 57, partially blind and hearing impaired, forcing him to give up his civil service job.

Lugo-Alonso has pleaded not guilty to impaired-driving charges.

The married father of two testified he was visiting a friend when the friend insisted they share a drink.

Later that night, Lugo-Alonso got in his Toyota Sienna minivan to drive back to his apartment near Bay Street and Queens Quay West. He said he never saw the cyclist before the collision on Lower Jarvis Street.

“I assumed I had hit something because I saw something hitting the front glass of my vehicle, but I wasn’t sure,” he said.

Walking through the streets of Mexican border towns like Reynosa or Nuevo Progreso, tourists can find a treat that is not allowed in the United States. Blowing a cloud of smoke, U.S. tourist Marco Ramirez said he doesn’t know much about cigars, but he sure enjoyed having a cold beer and a fat Cohiba Cuban cigar during his visit to Nuevo Progreso. “This is a nice little vacation,” Ramirez said. “I’m having a good time, and I get to try new things.” When asked about the cigar, Ramirez said he had never been attracted to them, but he felt the allure of trying something he can’t get back home in Atlanta.

Satisfying that curiosity is the reason Ramon Valles has a few boxes of Cuban cigars in a small wooden cabinet in a little stand on the main street of Nuevo Progreso. The stand also holds zarapes, hats and other tourist souvenirs.

“They say they can’t get them over there, but here they can,” Valles said.

While he typically sells the cigars at $4 to $5 a piece, occasionally tourists will buy a small box of five or even one of the large ones with anywhere from a dozen to 36 sticks.

The issue with those cigars comes when tourists want to take them home, said Rick Pauza, spokesman for U.S. Customs and Border Protection.

“It is illegal to import Cuban cigars or any other commodity because of an existing trade embargo between the U.S. and Cuba prohibiting all items made over there,” Pauza said.

Despite the ban, Pauza said CBP officers seize the Cuban imports at least once a month at various international bridges in the area.

“Generally if the person declares the cigars, we seize them because they are prohibited, but we don’t issue a penalty,” he said. “When they don’t declare them … then the penalty varies (depending) on the amount of cigars seized.”

The fines can range from $500 to $1,000.

While some tourists have tried to remove the cigar rings or place other labels in order to hide their country of origin, that strategy often doesn’t work because CBP officers look at several factors to spot any indicators of smuggling activity when processing bridge traffic, Pauza said, adding that officers are looking out for any prohibited items.

If any cigars make it past the ports of entry, enforcement falls on the hands of state and local authorities. The Monitor checked with a number of local police departments, but none reported having come across a cigar smuggling case.

For those seeking the thrill of trying a Cuban, cigar connoisseur Elvia Espiritu recommends purchasing them in Mexico — not from street vendors, but from a reputable cigar store.

Espiritu manages Casa Petridis, a McAllen cigar store with a long history tracing back to Mexico in the early 1900s.

She said there is much more to cigars than just selling them.

“You can buy a cigar a week for 10 years and still not experience and learn all there is to the world of cigars,” she said. “Each cigar is different. The leaves used to make it give it its flavor. They are hand-rolled and the technique used to roll them plays a role in the temperature of the cigar when it’s burning. That also plays a role in the experience of enjoying one.”

During the 1960s, many of the old cigar-making families left Cuba and moved to other Caribbean countries for political reasons, Espiritu said. The families took their techniques and their leaves with them, but the Cuban government also kept their old factories open, she said, explaining why there are Cuban and Caribbean versions of many of the famous cigars such as Cohiba, Romeo Y Julieta and others.

When asked about the cigars being sold on the streets in Mexico, Espiritu said the way the cigars are kept says a lot about their quality and at times their authenticity.

“You must love your cigars,” she said. “You need to keep them in a humidor away from light and take special care of them to keep them from drying out.”

If a cigar dries out, it loses the oils in the tobacco leaves that give it its special flavor. A real Cuban cigar would sell for about $15 to $40 in Mexico. Similar cigars made in other areas, such as the Dominican Republic, would sell for the same amount.

“You basically get what you pay for,” Espiritu said. “That is why here, we have three machines running 24-7 making sure that the cigars have the right amount of moisture because if we didn’t, we would have thousands of dollars in cigars go to waste.”

When Valles, the cigar vendor in Mexico, was asked if his cigars were actual Cubans, he replied they were — but became defensive.

When asked why he didn’t keep them in a humidor, he said he didn’t have one.

When asked about the prices, he said he was able to find them at good prices in order to keep the tourists happy.

The Backroom Theatre at the Expo Center can be a drafty, barnlike space, but whatever the chilly building lacks in insulation is made up for by the steam that comes off of the stage in “Anna in the Tropics,” presented by the Long Beach Shakespeare Company.

A Pulitzer Prize-winning play by Cuban emigre Nilo Cruz, “Anna” tells the story of the Cuban cigar-making industry in the late 1920s in Florida. Carrying on a tradition from the island, the factories employed lectors who would read books and stories aloud to the workers as they labored rolling cigars by hand.

Lectors were erudite and educated in a world where many of the workers were illiterate, so in some ways they were the connection to a wider world, and the stories they read transported the workers from their dreary lives.

“We may not be able to read or write, but we can recite lines from `Don Quixote’ and `Jane Eyre,”‘ the character of Ofelia says early in the play.

According to the playwright, the play was intended to be about possibly the last lector in Florida’s Ybor City near Tampa. With mechanization looming and the country on the edge of the Great Depression, the lector was rapidly becoming an anachronism. And so the play is set on the edge of an era, at a time when Cubans must decide between their traditions and the realities of their new homeland.

One group wants to dispatch lectors and move to mechanization, while the other side sees modernity as ending their way of life.
The play is more than a historical curio, however. It is about dreams, relationships and lost causes.

When we meet Juan Julian, the impeccable lector with the baritone voice, we may already sense that he is as doomed as Anna Karenina, the heroine and namesake of the novel he reads to the workers.

In “Anna in the Tropics” we meet Julian as he arrives to become the new lector at a cigar factory. What unfolds is an often steamy tale of love and adultery, of old and new values in the fading days of a soon-to-be lost era.

Long Beach Shakespeare Company regulars Benjamin Briseno and Randy Castrejon are solid. Briseno, in his fourth production with the company, has a low-pitched voice that is perfect for the lector. And Castrejon, in his seventh play with the troupe, is entirely believable as Julian’s tortured counterpart, who lost his wife to a lector.

But it is newcomer Kesia Elwin, who turns up the temperature and is electric as Conchita, who more than turns the tables on her philandering husband.

John Novak’s set design is sparse but conveys the tropical feel of Florida with rough-hewn wood and burlap.

And director Denis McCourt bring nice touches to the production, including a number of moments when we see the actors frozen in stance. They are like photographs, dimming recollections of something lost to time, pushed away in the drive to move forward.

TAMPA, Fla. (Apr. 8, 2011) – Cigars and maids may not have much in common, but Havana is the connection when British historian Jean Stubbs and Cuban author and journalist Pedro Perez Sarduy team up for a presentation at the University of South Florida Apr. 14 at 4:30 at the Patel Center for Global Solutions building, room 136.

This event, presented by the Institute for the Study of Latin America and the Caribbean (ISLAC), is free and open to the public.

The Cuban cigar’s international dimension captured Stubbs’ imagination on her first visit to Tampa 25 years ago and has led her on an exotic journey ever since. Her talk, “The Havana Cigar Goes Global,” will explore visually the people, places and politics swirling around this commodity of great fascination and controversy, which takes in her research on émigré Cubans across the Americas and globally.

Sarduy’s novel, The Maids of Havana, recently translated into English, drew on the experiences of his mother, a maid in pre-revolutionary Havana, to provide an unprecedented look into Black Cuban life and follows it through into the Cuban disaspora via the fictional experiences of a young Afro-Cuban woman in post-1980s Florida. He will present a slide show and sign copies of his book, which will be for sale.

“We are so fortunate to have these two eminent scholars – who happen to be married – available to talk about aspects of Cuba that are endlessly fascinating and about which there is so much more to know,” said ISLAC Director Rachel May. “They travel extensively and are only in Florida and the U.S. for a brief time. Tampa’s connection to cigars and Cubans of African descent makes this the perfect place for this event.”

Stubbs is the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies Bacardi Family Eminent Scholar for Spring 2011, Associate Fellow at the Institute for the Study of the Americas at the University of London and Professor Emerita of Caribbean History at London Metropolitan University, where she was the founding director for the Caribbean Studies Center.

She was awarded the UNESCO Toussaint L’Ouverture Medal for outstanding achievement in combating racism in political, literary and artistic fields in 2009.

Stubbs’ publications include Afro-Cuban Voices: On Race and Identity in Contemporary Cuba, AFROCUBA: An Anthology of Cuban Writing on Race, Politics and Culture, Cuba, Cuba: the Test of Time, and Tobacco on the Periphery: A Case Study in Cuban Labour History, l860-1958. She is engaged in collaborative research on the new Cuban Diaspora in Canada and Western Europe with Catherine Krull, and also co-editing with her the themed women and gender special issue of Cuban Studies out this year.

An award-winning poet, anthologies of Sarduy’s work include Surrealidad, Cumbite and Other Poems, and Malecon Siglo XX. He also co-edited AFROCUBA and Afro-Cuban Voices, on Race and Identity in Contemporary Cuba, based on interviews with Black Cubans currently living and working in the island.

Cuba’s cigar makers say sales are increasing despite the effects of anti-smoking laws coming into effects in many countries. Organisers of the annual cigar festival in Havana said sales rose two percent last year increasing in China and the Middle East.

Habanos, jointly owned by Cuba’s government and UK based Imperial Tobacco, dominates sales for hand-rolled, premium cigars, except in the US, and the company’s joint President Jorge Luis Fernandez Maique seemed unphased by new smoking restrictions in their number one customer Spain, where sales fell by a third in January.

He said: “There are anti-smoking campaigns but smokers keep finding legal solutions to smoke the products, whether it’s in places outfitted in accordance with the law. We have markets – like Spain, Germany, Belgium, Holland and others

- where they’ve really adapted to conditions and we expect the Spanish market will react the same way.”

China has now become the third largest market for Cuban cigars behind Spain and France knocking Germany down into fourth place.

Habanos generated 268 million euros in sales last year, an important source of foreign currency for the communist led island, but it is blocked from the US, the world’s biggest single consumer of cigars, because of a trade embargo.

Cuba is phasing out its longstanding monthly allotments of subsidized cigarettes as President Raul Castro works to jump-start the island’s sputtering economy. Beginning next month, some 2.5 million Cubans over the age of 54 no longer will get their four packs of cigarettes as part of the country’s ration program, the government announced on Wednesday.

“The Council of Ministers has resolved to eliminate cigarettes from the rationed family basket as of September as part of the measures gradually being adopted to limit state subsidies,” an official statement said.

The cigarettes “are not a primary necessity,” it said.

Castro has said that communist-ruled Cuba’s ration system eventually will be eliminated as he moves to modernize the economy.

Monthly allotments of chickpeas, potatoes and a pound (0.45 kg) of sugar were removed from the system this year.

Many subsidized items were cut in the 1990s after the collapse of former benefactor the Soviet Union plunged the island into a deep recession.

But allotments of inexpensive cigarettes for Cubans born before 1956 were kept in place.

TRIMMING STATE PAYROLL

Local economists estimate the ration of rice, beans and other staples provides enough food for less than two weeks, leaving many Cubans to turn to state-run stores and markets.

Castro, since taking over from his ailing elder brother Fidel Castro in 2008, has pushed to restructure the centralized economy, which has been battered by hurricanes, the global financial crisis and chronic inefficiencies.

He has called for the elimination of all subsidies, and such things as state-sponsored honeymoons and vacations already have been cut. But Cubans would still enjoy free health care, education and social security.

Castro recently announced plans to lay off 1 million workers over five years, or a fifth of the labor force, and has called for more family farming, self-employment and small business creation to make up for cuts in the state’s payroll.

Cuba is an important tobacco and cigar producer and boasts one of the world’s highest per-capita rates of smokers.

Unlike many countries where cigarettes are heavily taxed, Cuba sells unfiltered black tobacco cigarettes for as little as 7 pesos a pack at state stores, or around 40 cents, while the allotted packs cost just 2 to 3 pesos.

Retirees can often be seen on Havana’s streets selling their subsidized cigarettes for 5 pesos a pack.

“This is a blow for the elderly like me,” 82-year-old Esperanza Rodriguez said. “It was like a little bit of money they gave us each month.”

By reuters.com, August 26, 2010

Liam Neeson wants the stars of The A-Team to wear nicotine patches instead of chain smoking cigars if there is a sequel. The actor plays John ‘Hannibal’ Smith in Joe Carnahan’s big screen adaptation of the hit 1980s TV show. The film is about a group of US Army Special Forces soldiers who become mercenaries after they escape from jail, where they were sent after they were convicted of a crime they didn’t commit. Liam’s character is famous for his love of cigars, which horrified the actor, who quit smoking in the 1990s. He tried to use rubber cigars at first, but was chain-smoking again by the second day of filming.

“I stopped smoking 16 years ago, it was a real issue for me,” Liam told Australia radio programme The Kyle and Jackie O Show. “Joe insisted I have cigars and because it was Canada, they don’t have a trade embargo with Cuba and the props guys got me these amazing Cuban cigars.

“I got them to make rubber ones, because I didn’t want to be puffing on a cigar, but Joe, who is a big cigar smoker said, ‘No, it looks so false!’ I said, “Joe, I’m an addict! I can’t smoke this stuff!’ Day 2 and I discovered cigars. It was dangerous!”

Liam has now managed to wean himself off tobacco for a second time, and has already decided he will never smoke for a film again. If there is a sequel to The A-Team, he is planning to suggest his character wears nicotine patches instead of smoking.

“If we do a sequel, I think I’ll have to insist on no cigars,” Liam said. “We’ll all have patches on instead.”

From stuff.co.nz, June 21, 2010

LONDON (June 16) — At a 1945 lunch with the king of Saudi Arabia, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill was told that he couldn’t spark up a stogie in the pious monarch’s presence. The wartime leader protested, saying his own “rule of life prescribed as an absolutely sacred rite smoking cigars … before, after and if need be during all meals and in the intervals between them.” Sensibly, the Saudi ruler relented. Nowadays, though, some people aren’t so willing to indulge the ex-prime minister’s addiction. Like the unknown censor who airbrushed a cigar from an iconic photo of Churchill that adorns the entrance to London’s Britain at War Museum.

Taken at the opening of a new air base in 1948, the poster shows the wartime chief flashing his famous V for victory sign. But the Cuban roll that was originally clamped between Churchill’s lips has disappeared, leaving the prime minister with an unseemly open-mouthed gawp.
“Viewing the now disfigured image reveals just how unhinged the vociferous anti-smoking lobby has become,” David McAdam, the visitor who first noticed that the PM had posthumously kicked his taste for tobacco, told the Daily Mail. “So much for the notion that only communist tyrants airbrushed history.”

Museum manager John Welsh denied having anything to do with the edit. He said that he didn’t notice the missing cigar until McAdam approached his staff.

“We’ve got all sorts of images in the museum, some with cigars and some without,” Welsh told the paper. “We’ve even got wartime adverts for cigarettes in the lift down to the air raid shelter, so we wouldn’t have asked for there to be no cigar.” He refused to reveal who originally turned the photo into a poster for the museum, and presumably removed the cigar.

But Churchill isn’t the first famous smoker to have his nicotine fix retrospectively nixed. Here’s a pack of puffers whose acts of inhaling have also been consigned to the ashtray of history:

Paul McCartney
Peer closely at the original artwork of the Beatles’ “Abbey Road” LP and you might just notice that a barefoot Macca is clutching a cigarette in his right hand. That tiny smoke was too much for U.S. print giant Allposters, who in 2003 demanded that the butt be digitally removed. Beatles publisher Apple Records later protested, telling the BBC, “We have never agreed to anything like this.”

Bette Davis
In 2008, the U.S. Postal Service issued a stamp in honor of the sultry starlet, based on a still from 1950′s “All About Eve.” But the hand-painted portrait left out an important detail featured in the original image: a tobacco stick the actress had been elegantly holding in her hand.

And if there was anything Davis was known for in Hollywood — OK, apart from that — it was her incessant smoking. “I’ve been close to Bette Davis for 38 years,” quipped Henry Fonda at a 1979 roast of the actress, “and I have the cigarette burns to prove it.”

Jean-Paul Sartre
Once asked by a Newsweek journalist to list the important things in his life, the grumpy French philosopher replied, “I don’t know. Everything. Living. Smoking.” But a 2005 celebration of the existentialist’s life at Paris’ National Library couldn’t show the philosopher indulging in his favorite activity, in case it broke tough tobacco advertising laws.

As there are few photos of Sartre not smoking — he polished off two packs of cigarettes and two tobacco-stuffed pipes a day — the library was forced to edit out the philosopher’s Gauloise in a 1946 shot.

Clement Hurd
A portrait of the famed illustrator clutching a cigarette appeared in the back of the classic children’s book “Goodnight Moon” for some 20 years. But in 1995, Kate Jackson — then editor-in-chief of publisher HarperCollins — spotted the cancer causer and had it smudged out. “It is potentially a harmful message to very young kids,” Jackson told The New York Times, “and it doesn’t need to be there.”

That act of censorship outraged some long-standing “Goodnight” fans, who demanded the photo be restored to its smoky glory. Hurd’s son, though, said the illustrator — who died in 1988 — wouldn’t have been too bothered, as he’d kicked the habit in the 1950s and “really disliked smoking later in life.”

aolnews.com, June 17, 2010

Cuba’s most famous tobacco grower, Alejandro Robaina, died this week. Robaina, who was 91, belonged to one of Cuba’s oldest tobacco-growing families.

He was devoted to his tobacco crop, and when Fidel Castro herded most tobacco growers onto collective farms, Robaina stood his ground. His tobacco was of such high quality that he was allowed to keep his plantation.

Cuba’s most famous tobacco grower, Alejandro Robaina has died. He was 91, smoked his first cigar at the age of nine. And to his dying days he was devoted to his crop.

Robaina’s cigar tobacco was of such high quality that Fidel Castro allowed the grower to keep his plantation when other growers were herded onto collective farms.

NPR’s Tom Gjelten profiled Alejandro Robaina for this program in 1999 and has this remembrance.

TOM GJELTEN: Alejandro Robaina raised tobacco leaf in eastern Cuba on 35 acres his family settled back in 1845. I visited him one lovely afternoon a decade ago.

Mr. ALEJANDRO ROBAINA (Tobacco Grower): (Through translator) My grandfather began growing tobacco on this land in the last century. And then came my father and then me, then my son and my grandson. I’m famous, because my tobacco is among the best in the world, or the best in the world.

GJELTEN: A classic problem with socialism is the loss of pride in private production. That’s what made Alejandro Robaina’s story so special in socialist Cuba. He loved his tobacco. As we sat on his patio that day, Don Alejandro showed me what made his tobacco a national treasure. Taking a bunch of dry, fermented leaves, he rubbed them one by one.

Mr. ROBAINA: (Spanish spoken)

GJELTEN: See how they shine, he said. The leaves were as smooth as satin.

Mr. ROBAINA: (Spanish spoken)

GJELTEN: Each leaf was a little different, he pointed out. And he showed me how the leaves would be combined to produce a special flavor.

Mr. ROBAINA: (Spanish spoken)

GJELTEN: Alejandro Robaina had already been working in his fields for 30 years when Fidel Castro came to power and Fidel agreed to leave him alone. A good thing. After the revolution, Robaina told me, Cuban tobacco took a turn for the worse.

Mr. ROBAINA: (Through translator) A little of the quality was lost, let’s be frank. For a while the state didn’t take care of the tobacco. But now the state is committed to good tobacco, because it earns good money.

GJELTEN: In his later years, Don Alejandro became Cuba’s best known cigar ambassador, traveling the world to promote Cuban cigars. He had a decent income, though only by Cuban standards.

Mr. ROBAINA: (Spanish spoken)

GJELTEN: I think I should make more, he told me. Mucho mas, he joked. Don Alejandro died a week ago today, leaving his Cuban tobacco farm in the hands of grandson.

Tom Gjelten, NPR News.