El Habano: The Global Luxury Smoke

Abstract

‘As civil liberties triumphed and political constitutions were guaranteed, the cigar came into ascendancy once more, coinciding with the advent of economic liberalism in Cuba, which threw the port of Havana open to all nations, ’ wrote Cuban ethnographer Fernando Ortiz in 1940 with the publication of his seminal work on transculturation. ‘And in this atmosphere of free industrial and commercial enterprise Havana tobacco, by the unanimous plebiscite of the world, was awarded the imperial scepter of the tobacco world. Havana tobacco from then on became the symbol of the triumphant capitalistic bourgeoisie. The nineteenth century was the era of the cigar.’¹ Ortiz blazed new ground by fashioning a Cuban contrapunteo (counterpoint) out of Cuba’s two major commodities: tobacco and sugar, encapsulated in the proud cigar band versus the lowly sugar sack. He used tobacco and sugar as metaphorical constructs, highlighting the fetish power of the commodities and a counter-fetish interpretation that challenged essentialist understandings of Cuban history.

For the ideas expressed here I am indebted to my colleagues in the Commodities of Empire British Academy Research Project, and sister collaborative projects Plants, People and Work (International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam) and Global Commodity Chains (University of Konstanz). My research has been facilitated by many other colleagues and institutions, more recently the Center for Latin American Studies, University of Florida, where I spent the 2011 Spring Semester as the Bacardi Visiting Scholar.My special thanks go to Karin Hofmeester and Bernd-Stefan Grewe for facilitating my participation in the 2010 and 2011 commodity-chain workshops in Konstanz and encouraging me to frame my work on the luxury Havana cigar in the context of concerns underpinning this volume.