Sara's Cuba Trip

During my trip to Cuba I was lucky enough to travel to Pinar del Rio to visit La Vega de Ledesma tobacco plantation. The harvest of the tobacco had recently been completed so a lot of the crops had been cut down. The tobacco leaves had been taken to the air curing barns to remove the moisture and to turn the leaves from green to the beautiful brown we know and love for the cigars.

The leaves are sewn into pairs and hung on poles which are then placed on the racks in the barn. As the leaves cure the poles are progressively raised higher up the racks. The leaves picked from nearer the top of the shade grown plant will produce a darker oilier wrapper when they are air cured as they are usually the last to be harvested.

The leaves are then cured for 50 days and then the fermentation process takes a further 30 days. The next stage in the process is to send the leaves to the sorting house where they are classified according to size, colour and texture. Once at the sorting house we saw the wrapper leaves being fermented to even out their colour, once sorted and rested are packed in to bales made from royal palm bark and transferred to the warehouses to age for at least 6 months. The filler leaves are sorted in to 4 essential flavour categories - medio tiempo, ligero, seco and volado, the wrappers are graded according to size, colour and texture in to well over 50 categories. The filler leaves being thicker leaves are fermented for a second and a third time.

The filler leaves are stripped off the central vein and final classification in to ligero, seco and volado. During the final fermentation the ligero and medio tiempo leaves require around 90 days where as the seco leaves are fermented for around 60 days. Once the final fermentation has been completed the sun grown leaves are aired on racks for a few days and then packed in to bales to be aged. Ligero and medio tiempo leaves require a minimum 2 years ageing, seco is aged for 12-18 months and volado and capote 9 months.

I was also lucky enough to visit the La Corona factory where I was able to see the process of rolling cigars. Again the tobacco leaves are sorted in to sizes and colours before being sent to the rollers. Watching a cigar roller is hypnotic, they make the process look so easy but as we all know it is an art form with there being 9 levels of rollers!! The cigars are draw tested and at every stage of the colour sorting and boxing process they can be rejected.

The next visit was to the world known El Laguito factory - the home of the Cohiba and what a beautiful home it was! The factory is on a lot smaller scale with the fact that it is in a converted house but it has an air of class that is hard to beat. This cigar factory was definitely my favorite and I feel honored to have been able to see it first hand.

The last visit was to the ICT factory where machine made cigars are made. The leaves that do not pass the test for the premium cigars are used - this can be purely due to tears in the leaves as they cannot be used in the rolling process. There are new and old machines used. The new machines can be looked after one employee to two machines whereas the older are one to one! The machines themselves work in such a way you can't help but watch over and over again the process being completed. All of us stood still feeling drawn to just watching the Cigars one after another being made! It was tough to pull yourself away!

Once made the Cigars are then rested before then being boxed. Once boxed they're 'frozen' to make sure there is no possibility of weevil before they are then stored in the warehouse and shipped out!

If you get a chance to visit Cuba I would jump at it as the country itself is steeped full of history and architecture and then to top it off you can see a Cuban cigar from seed to box with every fascinating step in between!



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