(Author’s note: Cigar smoking is bad for you, I don’t care how rarely you do it. So is eating fried foods, not exercising enough, drinking too much or too little alcohol and having a bad attitude.)
Mexico is crawling with Cuban cigars, most of which are fake.
Those Cubans in a nice wooden box with a glass front being hawked by young men at the port are fake. Cubans sold in convenience stores next to maracas and T-shirts? Fake. Cubans sold by the bartender at the tequila bar? Almost certainly fake.
One of my favorite challenges when visiting Mexico or the Caribbean – the only times I allow myself to smoke a cigar – is to sniff out the real Cubans from the fake ones. To be honest, I doubt I could tell a Cuban from a good Dominican in a blind test, but you can get Dominicans anywhere (although there is a good share of falsity in the Dominican cigar market, too). But smoking a cigar takes anywhere from 30 to 90 minutes, while seeking out the real thing can fill an entire afternoon with good fun.
I have occasionally asked a fellow cigar smoker sitting on the adjacent stool in a cruise ship’s cigar bar what is so alluring about sucking the smoke from a wad of tobacco leaves, particularly since doing so is known to kill people. Sometimes I get a look that says, “If I have to explain it you won’t understand.” This indicates to me that my bar mate has missed the point of my question, because I take inexplicable pleasure in the occasional cigar myself.
If you do it right, smoking a cigar makes you look really cool, especially if you’re inside a bar with other smokers and there’s lovely blue smoke curling overhead. The aroma of an unsmoked cigar is irresistibly delicious. The very act of lighting a cigar correctly (by first lighting a sliver of cedar, then using that to light the cigar) is a beautiful thing. The rare sight of a woman smoking a cigar is spectacularly sexy. Smoking a cigar while sipping a single malt Scotch or a mellow cognac makes for one of the most decadent and delightful experiences not requiring a partner that one can have.
But, I digress. We were talking about finding an authentic Cuban, not so much smoking one.
First, it’s important to understand that there are no guarantees, even in Cuba (visitors there report that fakes are sold on the streets of Havana). Second, counterfeiters are getting more clever about masking their fakes. Third, unless you’re a real aficionado, you may not know the difference anyway.
The cigar bar manager on one of our cruises was a Jamaican man who had been with Royal Caribbean for 26 years, much of that time spent running the cigar bar. (Interestingly, his cigar smoking rules are opposite of mine – he smokes only at home.) Hence, he had become something of an expert on cigars generally and Cuban cigars specifically. Here are his tips:
1. If you don’t see the cigar come out of a humidor, it’s not worth a buck, let alone the 10 to 30 dollars you’ll spend for a Cuban.
2. Check the inside of the ring band. If you can feel the imprint of the label, it’s more likely authentic.
3. Speaking of the ring band, if it is loose on the cigar, it’s more likely a fake.
That’s it, unless the cigar looks like it was a handful of tobacco wadded into a torpedo by a drunken monkey, which would be a dead giveaway. You can go to web sites that go into a lot more detail about spotting a fake based on more specific criteria, like way the box is sealed and other details (one of the best web sites is here.) For my purposes, however, the three basic tests were sufficient. So, when we stopped in Cabo San Lucas I was ready. We waded through the nice people selling turtle-shaped wooden whistles, Chiclets, bracelets and, yes, fake Cuban cigars in glass-topped wooden boxes. We wandered about the town and eventually spied a promising sight.
There, not far from Cabo Wabo, was a tiny roadside shop that advertised only Cuban cigars. I made a beeline, where a tiny elderly woman waited inside the six-by-fifteen shack, about half of which was a walk-in humidor. Prices were not cheap – single cigars started at about six bucks and Cohibas were $20 or more (a Cohiba Churchill about the size of a small baseball bat ran about $30 before haggling). I interrogated the poor woman, who said she's smoked several cigars a day for nearly half a century, and she had all the right answers. She actually pealed a ring band off one of the cigars to show me the imprint, without my prompting. She scoffed at the cigars sold at the port. I would have suspected collusion between the nice lady and my Jamaican tutor, except he hadn't directed me to her store.
In short, she sold me. I bought four Boliva Tubos No. 2 cigars, which are generally rated as having a bold, earthy flavor, and two medium-flavored Coronitas Romeo y Juliets. She wanted $60 and we agreed on $50. I had her cut one right there and light it (another secret to lighting a cigar is that you don’t suck the flame from the cedar through the cigar – you just turn the tip of the cigar through the flame until it’s lit). I looked very, very cool as we walked back through town, though I was careful to stay downwind from Kathleen.
That night, my new Jamaican friend at the cigar bar (I deeply regret that I don’t recall his name – he was a very nice man), confirmed that I had scored six authentic Cubans, even while giving the bad news to another smoker in the room that he had counterfeits. I felt justifiably superior to the poor slob who bought the fakes and have no doubt that the buzz I felt was induced by lithium straight from the land of Castro.
