Castro, Cohiba and the Quitting

At the beginning there is no marketing idea, but a bodyguard with a good cigar. The story, as Fidel Castro told it himself: in the mid-1960s he noticed the aroma of a cigar smoked by one of his bodyguards — a private fuma, rolled by the guard’s friend, torcedor Eduardo Rivera. Castro had Rivera come to see him, and from Rivera’s blend there emerged from 1966, in a guarded villa in the Havana suburb of El Laguito, a cigar that officially did not exist: the Cohiba, named after the Taíno word for their rolled tobacco leaves. For sixteen years it remained a state and diplomatic gift, received by Cuba’s guests and purchasable by no amount of money; only in 1982 did it enter free sale.

The brand’s most prominent smoker became simultaneously its most celebrated quitter. On 26 August 1985 — the date Castro himself cited in a 1994 interview with the magazine Cigar Aficionado — he put down the cigar: Cuba was then running a broad anti-tobacco campaign, and the Comandante declared that he had to set a good example. As far as is known, he kept to it.

A remark from the years that followed is less reliably attested. Agency reports from 2006 record it without date or occasion: “Smoke them if you want — but the best thing you can do with that box is give it to your enemy.”

The Cohiba survived its creator’s departure unscathed. It became the flagship of the Habano in the fullest sense, the prestige brand of the island — and, the most reliable proof of fame in this industry, probably the most counterfeited cigar in the world.