Women Who Smoke Cigars…..

a cigar is made by people from all over the world…

In many premium cigars, the wrapper (outer portion) of the cigar wil come from one region, the binder from another, and the filler (from which much of the flavor comes) from another.

Nicaragua, Brazil, Honduras, Mexico, and the Dominican Republic are countries known as being tobacco producers. And of course Cuba….

I’m fascinated by the life of a tobacco farmer. I’m curious, compassionate, and thankful, all mixed together. As I enjoy my cigars, relaxed mostly, but at times grumbling about being forced to participate in my hobby as a second class citizen – forced to withstand the perils of nature, and during the winter months…..

Man up Damsel!

The life of a tobacco farm veguero
a story of a Cuban farmer

Photos and portions of this post taken from the blog authored by David Lansing.

….

We walked out into the fields where turkeys and chickens were pecking at the red soil, searching for the pests that eat little holes in the silky-smooth green leaves. There was a veguero or tobacco farmer in the fields looking slightly malnourished and no doubt older than his actual age. He wore a filthy armless shirt that looked to be homemade and a straw hat, too small for his head, that reminded me of something a child would wear.

……..

There was another veguero working in the drying shed, a cheerful young man with a gold-capped front tooth. It looked like the man had lost the tooth, since the gum-line above it was damaged, and it had been stuck back in his mouth and then, perhaps where it had partially broken off, capped with the gold.

When we told him we were mostly American, he shook our hands and told us that a few years back he’d tried escaping on a boat to Florida but had been caught and ended up spending 17 months in a Cuban prison.

…..

Like just about everyone we’ve met in Cuba, the vegueros were extraordinarily friendly to us, happy to have their photo taken or tell us, in Spanish, about their lives in a way that never seemed intended to elicit our sympathy. Still, you couldn’t help but feel empathetic. Their lives are as difficult as that of a farmsteader working a dry plot of land in the Dakotas a hundred years ago. Except that the Dakota farmer could always give up the land and try to make ago of it somewhere else or move to the city and become a shoe salesman.These vegueros can’t. Like their fathers and their father’s fathers, they were born on the land to work the tobacco fields and will most likely die on the land…..[end story]

The life of a vegueros tobacco farmer….our hobby, and as culturalists, we believe its our right to carry on this age old tradition – the cigar has a certain symbolism in North America, historically associated with power, luxury and fine taste – to the farmer, his heritage bred out of necessity, a lifestyle for the poorer… self realization is the notion that we, again, are satisfying our indulgences on the backs of the less fortunate.

David Lansing, a modern day flâneur? 

"I started this blog because I felt that the things that were mostinteresting to me in traveling were exactly the things my editors didn’twant me to write about. All those little short stories I experiencedwhile traveling to Cuba or Malaysia or Spain ended up as unpublishablenotes in a hundred different notebooks where they died a lonely deathin one of my file cabinets."

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