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July 11, 2005
Romeo y Julieta
No photos are allowed at the cigar factory Romeo y Julieta. We chose to go to this particular factory because the Romeo y Julieta cigars are my dad’s favorite. Cigars in Cuba sell for between $5 and $25 apiece officially. They are exported everywhere (except the U.S.). Peter and I were very interested in getting a glimpse of an industry famously Cuban. The family that began Romeo y Julieta had fled to the Dominican Republic after the revolution in 1959, and continues to make and sell them from the DR. On our tour, the guide told us, “This factory has been in operation since 1865.” She did not mention that the original business was seized by the government and that all cigar factories were nationalized after the revolution. This was the situation of nearly all businesses in Cuba after 1960.
Today, all of the famously Cuban cigar brands (Cohiba, Romeo y Julieta, Montecristo, Joya de Monterrey) are rolled and processed in all of the state-run factories, but packaged as they always have been. What make each brand different from one another are 1) the mold of the cigar and 2) the blend of different varietals of tobacco leaves. It reminds me of the wine industry. Imagine if all the great wineries in the Napa Valley were seized and nationalized. The creativity required to fill little niches in the marketplace would be snuffed. It would be a narrow, unchanging, expensive world for people who enjoy wine. Cuba’s motto seems to be “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”. Rows and rows of cubanos roll cigar after cigar by hand. There is an earthy, sepia-filtered feel to the massive rooms. The leaves stain the workbenches, and the lighting is an amber-glow. There is a buzz; a hum of worker bees. Nothing has changed in 50 years, it seems. I can hardly see straight because of all the irony. How strange that the Cuban government, founded on the abolition of private enterprise for “moral” reasons, so heavily relies economically on the original ideas and methods of those entrepreneurs it ran out of the country. It’s because private enterprise is the only thing that seems to keep an economy afloat; the only thing that keeps people fed; the only thing that gives people hope.
(All the names of Cubans in these posts have been changed as a precautionary measure)
Posted by Emily Marie Stremel Mork at July 11, 2005 11:59 PM
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