Habanos Man Of the Year

El Presidente · October 27, 2022

The article doesn't survive translation well........but that is because the Cuban press never miss an opportunity to use 10 words when they could get away with two.

This man from Cienfuegos is on the select list of men distinguished with the Habano Man award. / Photo: courtesy of the interviewee.

Vicente, the Havana Man of Cienfuegos

27 October, 2022 Armando Saez Chavez 0 comments

The memory of his grandfather while enjoying the smoke of a "Quintero", sitting on a stool leaning against the post of the doorway of the country house, has accompanied Vicente Torres García all his life. However, most of the time he was not the owner of the select brand, since it was common that the diminished domestic economy forced the old man to make the tobacco sorullo of his own harvest.

Surely, that was one of the recurring images evoked by Vicente when he held in his hands the sculpture that accredited him as the Habano Man 2021, an expensive dream of any tobacco grower. This is the highest award conferred by Habanos SA, and given for the International Fair, to those exponents with a rich history in the universe of cigars, both in the cultivation of Solanaceae and in the industrial process of the leaf.

“Imagine, I come from a family of tradition in this agricultural line, he recalls, so from a very young age I was linked to this world. Then, due to the paths of life, for more than half a century I have been related to the Ministry of Agriculture and of them more than three decades linked to the tobacco sector, in which I was 22 years as director of the Provincial Company”.

The experience of this eternal lover of the mysteries that surround the smoke of ineffable aroma is very vast. Under his leadership, the workers of the union have gone through the "green and ripe", as he himself recognizes. Then very complex situations arise, such as those experienced during the so-called Special Period and also the current shortages, which have forced us to resort to all kinds of alternatives in order to maintain production, with thousands of obstacles ahead, but with optimism and desire to do skin deep.

“Today my responsibilities are not administrative, but moral, and the commitment is to advise the new direction of the entity to continue with the development of this important economic item. I confess that precisely in those challenges I thought when they gave me the award”.

Of course, the wisdom of this man of peasant roots has been more in his roots in the land and his close relationship with the workers, than the flow that the academy could offer him. However, there is no one who will tell you a story about the best ways to make seedbeds, achieve quality seedlings, cure tobacco, the operation of stemming or the twisting of leaves in factories and even if vitolas, seals and packaging it is about.

So, the authority and mastery of the trade have been for Vicente Torres García the daily praxis and the ups and downs imposed by the daily dynamics of work in each of the work areas that pay tribute to that magic of shaping cigars for export and national consumption.

*For Vicente Torres García, the link with the cultivation and manufacture of tobacco was the main course of his life. / Photo: Armando Sáez.*

And all you have to do is give the Cienfuegos Habano Man your foot —by the way, the first to hold such status in the central and eastern regions of the country—, so that he can flood you with historical data, since Admiral Columbus arrived on the northeast coast from the island of Cuba, to the north of the current province of Holguín, a place where the Spanish conquerors found aboriginal men and women inhaling smoke from cylinders of dry leaves, which they called cohiba.

The Habanos Awards are compared to the Academy Awards in Hollywood. People who promote and favor the tobacco industry and its commercialization deserve such high recognition. The sculptures that identify the award are made by hand, without any mold, with a unique design and made with ancient goldsmith techniques.

“Before the highest management of the Tabacuba Business Group, right there is the delivery ceremony, I stated that this encouragement, personally, constituted a great commitment to continue with my modest contribution to the tobacco development of the country and especially that of my province of origin, Cienfuegos”, underlined this constant and enthusiastic veteran entrepreneur.