Havana

Havana did not grow the leaf that made it famous. The tobacco came overland and by coastal schooner from the Vuelta Abajo, three hundred kilometres west, and Havana did everything after that: sorted it, aged it, rolled it, boxed it in cedar, banded it, and shipped it out through the harbour under the Morro. That division of labour is the city's whole story. The name Habano attached to the place of dispatch rather than the place of cultivation, and it is the reason a Cuban cigar is identified by a city that has almost no tobacco fields of its own.

The nineteenth-century factory floor made Havana a political city as well as an industrial one. Rollers worked in a galera, a long open hall with benches in rows, and from about 1865 they paid a lector out of their own wages to read to them from a platform - newspapers in the morning, novels in the afternoon. Spanish authorities understood the arrangement well enough to suppress it. The men on those benches were literate, organised, and dangerous, and when they were driven out by war and depression they carried the galera, the lector and the politics to Key West, Tampa and Mexico.

After 1959 the industry was taken over and its owners scattered. On 15 September 1960 the government seized sixteen cigar factories, fourteen cigarette plants and twenty tobacco warehouses; the families who had run Partagas, H. Upmann and Hoyo de Monterrey left, mostly for Florida, the Canary Islands, Honduras, Nicaragua and the Dominican Republic, and rebuilt the brand names abroad. Havana kept the buildings, the leaf and the trademarks in most of the world, and lost the American market on 7 February 1962. Both halves of that split are still commercially live sixty years later.

Havana is a finishing and dispatch city rather than a growing one. Leaf arrives cured and fermented from Pinar del Rio and, in smaller volumes, from the Partido and Remedios zones, and is graded, stripped and aged in the city's warehouses before it reaches a galera. The classification system that decides a cigar's blend - volado, seco, ligero for filler, capote for binder, capa for wrapper - is applied here, and the final quality control, banding and boxing are done here too. What the world buys as a Habano is a Havana assembly of a western Cuban harvest.

The galera is the social unit: rows of benches, a foreman's desk, and a raised chair for the lector, who was chosen and paid by the rollers rather than the firm and could be voted out if the performance flagged. Readers worked through the daily press, then serialised novels, and the habit of naming cigars after books - Montecristo above all - comes directly off those benches. Rollers are allotted a daily smoke, the fuma, and the trade has its own vocabulary of tools and grades that outsiders rarely hear. Since 1999 the Festival del Habano each February has layered a second, commercial ritual on top of the older one, bringing buyers from dozens of countries for factory visits and a humidor auction.