Partagas in the morning

Photo inside Partagas VIP room by Nick Fletcher.

Every year it is the same here in Havana; every year it is different. Always we start off by going to the Partagás factory to buy cigars. Every year we have met the director of the cigar shop on the ground floor, Abel Expósito Diaz, a tall, handsome man who will cradle a box of Cohibas in his hands as if it were a child. Always Abel comes over to us on the sales floor and says, “So you are back in Cuba. Welcome, welcome.” And then he will fish out a small tarnished bronze key from his pants pocket and open a locked drawer behind the counter and grab a handful of cigars that have no bands, no name. These are specially rolled cigars, something that you cannot buy, and he will dole out one to each of us, smiling and looking hard in your eyes as he slips it to you, as if he were divvying up the loot from an especially sophisticated bank heist that he had orchestrated.

While it is encouraged to smoke cigars in Partagas it is not polite to smoke these particular cigars on the sales floor. It would be like sipping Cristal at a wine tasting while everyone else was getting tiny pours of an Australian merlot. So Abel will come out from behind the counter and say, “Come on, my friends. Come with me,” and lead us to the special room in the back with the walk-in glass humidor and the well-worn leather armchairs and the wood paneled walls with photos of Fidel and Raul and even Che. Abel will invite us to sit down and he will light our cigars while a waiter pours us glasses of aged rum and Abel will ask us how we like these cigars and if we think Havana has changed since we were last here, and we will ask him about his family.

This is what we have done almost every year since our first trip five years ago, but as I say, everything is the same and yet everything is different and this year there is no Abel and when I inquire about him in the cigar shop the young clerk will shrug and feign that he has never heard the name although I do not believe him. So without Abel and without an invitation, we go into the VIP smoking room anyway, almost daring one of the young salesmen to stop us or ask us what we are doing. The room is exactly the same as it was the last time we were here and yet it is completely different. On our last visit, the room was crowded with buyers from Japan and Germany and France and the smoke was so thick that Abel immediately turned on an industrial fan. This time there was no smoke and no clients; the room was empty. I had never seen it empty before. It looked the way a house does the morning after a particularly raucous party when the harsh light of day streams in and everything that had looked romantic and convivial in the candle-lit room now simply looks tired and threadbare.

We slipped into the walk-in humidor and examined the stacked boxes of Montecristos and Cohibas and then Hardy pulled out a color Xerox of a story I’d written about us at Partagas that also had a photo of him blowing smoke directly at the camera. He slipped the article and the photo between two framed photos hanging on the wall and we all admired the addition to the gallery and then someone came into the room and told us that the tour of the cigar factory above us, which we had already paid for, was about to begin so we hurried out of the shop, wondering if it would be possible that the story and photo of Hardy would still be pinned to the wall if we returned next year while knowing full well that it would not.