Iconic Cuban cigar goes un-smoked at home

PINAR DEL RIO, Cuba (Miami Herald) The elderly cigar maker sits at a rustic table next to a tobacco field and a barn filled with hanging rows of aging tobacco and meticulously selects the brown leaves, rolling the most tender ones carefully for the center of the world’s most celebrated tobacco product: the Cuban cigar.
But here in the province that’s the heart of the tobacco-growing region, as in Havana, it’s largely tourists who light up. Very few of the Cubans themselves smoke cigars. The economics of smoking, given the locals’ low, government-set salaries, put cigars out of reach for most people, making the iconic Cuban cigar something that’s produced for foreigners – for export and for tourism. Continued