Today started with a whimper rather than a roar. We have a slow start to our day. Just as well as Deb isn’t too well, she has picked up a Cuban cold, and is now fighting her own “Cold War”.
So I set out this morning to tick-off the last Cuban Icon from my list, a Cigar Factory!
I was picked up from the hotel at 11am (we were due to check-out at noon) and jumped into an old American Dodge”taxi”. It took about 10mins to get to the factory and after about 20 mins of shuffling around we finally got into the factory on a tour. We first saw the leaf sorting room (the leaves come pre-dried from the independent farmers), where leaves are graded from Top Cigar Outer Finish quality to that only worthy of cigarettes. They even have a training grade leaf that is above cigarette quality! At the same time the leaves are sorted they are also de-stemmed (the woody centre vein is removed). The leaves were sorted into a total of 6 piles.
From there we went to the rolling room. Here the people rolling the cigars (yes, it’s not very romantic, forget about your images of the finest cigars being rolled on the inner thigh of buxom virgins some producers put out there LOL), manually sort the leaves into centre fill, burning layer, aroma layer and finish layer. Then they put the cigar fully together. The rollers are expected to roll between 65 and 175 cigars in an 8 hour shift. The more they produce the more they get paid. 75% of all cigars produced are subjected to QA/QC and the bad one rejected and the roller that made them put back to training. Speaking of which; to become a cigar roller you must attend a 6 month training course (unpaid), normally around 300 people at a time are doing the training, and only about 30 of them get chosen to work. If they have too many rejects they are sent back to school. The better they get at rolling the more expensive cigars they roll.
The finished cigars are then put in a humidifier for anything up to 6 months to cure. There are people employed to check the quality of the final products, they smoke up to 30 cigars an afternoon!! (but only have to smoke about a ¼ of each one.)
The workers work a 5 day 40 hour week plus every other Saturday.
Everyone who works there can take home 5 cigars every day. Apparently this is where they make their money, selling them onto the (non-existent) black market for 5CUC each.
After the tour we jumped back into our regular car and back to the Hotel to get Deb and our bags, and get out to the airport for our flight.
We got to the airport at about 12:45 and it took us around 1 ½ hrs to check-in and get through security and emigration, most of the time was in the check-in queue!
OK Now please indulge me, before we “Leave the April Sun in Cuba” (I just had to get that line in somewhere), here are a couple more little bits of Cuban Trivia:
- When we landed in Cuba, there was a large number of people down the back of the plane that applauded, now that’s confidence in a pilot for you!!
- All traffic lights in Cuba have countdown timers for both the cars and the pedestrians, and for the pedestrians, when the time is getting short the little green man starts running!!
- Jose Marti, he is everywhere. Has anyone outside of Cuba ever heard of him? He led the Revolution, not Castro or Che. It was Marti.
Our flight left on time and we landed in Mexico at about 5:30pm local time. On the flight we were given sandwiches as a meal and they included a squeeze pouch of Jalapeno with it, 🙂 I got Deb’s as well, yum, so happy 🙂 . We got through immigration like a breeze, then waited and waited for our bags. After about 1 ¼ hrs, and a couple of times being checked out by the drug sniffer dogs, we finally had our bags, and then were lucky enough to get a red light going through Customs, this meant a full check of every bag we had! No problems and we were picked up by our guide, Ariushka, and were driven to our hotel, Las Alcobas (in a very nice part of town). The room is very comfortable, with all the trimmings you could possibly want.
Tomorrow looks like a busy day, we are both looking forward to a change of environment and new people and culture to discover.
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