Cigar industry

“ Many of the 5-cent cigars sold so extensively, contain a large proportion of Havana tobacco, and make a fairly fragrant and pleasant smoke. It is said that there are upwards of 100,000 open and proprietary brands of cigars on the market.
Cigarettes.—The sale of these little paper tubes filled with tobacco, has grown enormously within a few years and is still increasing. It is whispered that the ladies even, sometimes seek to find in them a whiff of the solace and comfort their brothers and 53husbands find in the pipe or cigar. There are many favorite brands on the market. ”

“ The remaining laborers are employed in assorting and packing the cigars for market. Only the choicest tobacco is used in this factory—each first-class cigar made here being warranted equal to any Havana brand. Thirty-five thousand cigars are manufactured daily, consuming thirty thousand pounds of tobacco monthly. The most amusing sight of all is to see these workmen drink water: it is contained in a kind of earthenware vessel which they call a “monkey-jug,” made from a porous earth obtained in Cuba, and shaped something like our American gallon-jug, only the orifice is on the side. ”

“ British cigars, like all other varieties, may be good, bad, or indifferent. By British we mean cigars manufactured in this country from the imported leaf; and as English capital can command the markets, there is no reason why the best tobacco should not be obtainable for importation. Using the same quality of leaf, a cigar can be produced in this country at a much lower cost than if imported ready made. We venture to think, notwithstanding popular prejudice, that a good British cigar is preferable to an inferior foreign make. ”

“ These lands are mainly held in small farms of four and five acres, each worked by a single family, who devote all their attention to the planting of the seed, the raising of the crop, the drying of the leaf, and even the final making of the finished cigar. They sell the cigars at their door, or take them to the town and sell them to the dealers, who buy and then put on their own labels and place them in the market. Nowhere in the United States will nature permit a tobacco leaf to stay on the plant until it is fully ripe; there is too much fear of frost. ”

“ During the early years of the nineteenth century women on the farms made practically all the domestic cigars then consumed in this country, and in many places the home-made cigar was a favorite medium of exchange. The earliest cigar factory in America was established in West Suffield, Conn., in 1810 and employed only women. ”

“ The cigar company acquired many competitors (partherships and corporations) engaged in interstate and foreign commerce, taking the parties covenants against engaging in the tobacco business; and it has also procured the organization of controlled corporations which have acquired competing manufacturers, jobbers, and distributers in the United States, Cuba, and Porto Rico. It manufacturers, sells, and distributes a considerable percentage of domestic cigars; is the dominating factor in the tobacco business, foreign and domestic, in Cuba and Porto Rico, and is there engaged in tobacco planting. ”

“ Besides this, there is another warehouse of nearly equal size, where finer kinds of tobacco are deposited, many of them in packages of buffalo-hide, marked "Giron," and Manilla for cheroots, in packages of sacking lined with palmetto leaves. There is still another warehouse for cigars, called the Cigar Floor, in which there are frequently one thousand five hundred chests, valued at one hundred pounds each, at an average, or one hundred and fifty thousand pounds in cigars alone. ”

“ From the fine gentlemen, who buy their cigars at Delmonico's, or get them direct from the importers, down to the little barefoot boys in the streets, who buy theirs from the Chinamen at the corners or pick up the stumps that are thrown away, all smoke. In some countries pipes and cigarettes are made to do duty by the poorer classes, but in New York cigars seem to be almost invariably preferred. Now, while there is nothing better, in the way of something to smoke, than a first-class Havana cigar, there is nothing nastier than some of the cheap abominations made in that shape in New York. ”

“ In connection with cigar manufacture, it may be necessary that government policy should encourage mechanization of cigar making if we hope to fill our cigar quota in the American market to the tune of 180 million cigars of which we have only filled the meager amount of six million cigars. ”

“ And the cigar need not consist entirely of Havana tobacco. A cigar of choice flavor is made of a mixture of tobaccos—Havana “filler” and “binder,” with, say, a “Connecticut seed” or Sumatra wrapper.
The manufacture of cigars has without doubt aided largely in building up the business of Key West. One authority says that there are two hundred factories, employing five thousand operatives, and transacting a business amounting to seven millions of dollars annually. ”

“ Whether you, as a smoker, buy one cigar, five cigars, five hundred or five thousand, you pay the same price per stuck, and there is no choice as to shops, so far as quality is concerned. Whether you buy in the Graben or the Taberstrasse of Vienna, or in an obscure shop in an obscure village a hundred miles from the capitol, you get the same quality of cigar for five, seven, nine, ten, or twelve kreutzers, in the one place as in the other. All come from one factory, and their goodness or badness never varies. ”

“ In the United States the weed exhausts four hundred thousand acres of excellent land, and employs forty thousand sickly and cadaverous cigar and tobacco makers. In England, where there is a duty upon tobacco of seventy-five cents a pound, and upon cigars of nearly four dollars a pound, the government derives about six million pounds sterling every year from tobacco. The French government gets from its monopoly of the tobacco trade nearly two hundred million francs per annum, and Austria over eighty million francs. ”

“ If they smoke at all in the tobacco-laden atmosphere of the factories, they are far more apt to be addicted to the cigarette than to the product of their own handicraft. The smoker, by the way, who visits Key West is doomed to disappointment; cigars are no cheaper there than in the most northwestern corner of our land. Nor should he bring with him the hope of sampling for once the brands beyond his means. The factories treat their swarms of visitors with every courtesy—except that of tucking a cigar, either of the five-cent or the dollar variety, into a receptive vest pocket. ”

“ From five hundred to fifteen hundred cigars are made in a day, according to the expertness of the manipulator and the kind of tobacco. Machines have not as yet been found to work well. The machine cigars are finished at the end by hand. He remarked that machines never can succeed so well as men, until they have the brains of men. A very nice widow, who kept a cigar store in New York, told me that many more women are employed in making cigars in Philadelphia than in New York; but the cigars made and sold there are mostly of the cheap kind, selling for two or three cents apiece. ”

“ Abe exclaimed. "They do get a lot of money out of cigars. You take the average cigar to-day which costs sixty dollars a thousand to put on the market, Mawruss, and each cigar stands the manufacturer in as follows: [Pg 26]
"Sure I know," Morris agreed, "but the art about taxing cigars ain't so much to sting the feller that manufactures them and the feller that buys them as the fellers which accepts them free for nothing. ”

“ It may be larger, and the large Havana leaves, free from veins and suitable for use as wrappers for fine, large cigars are so scarce and high, as to enhance their cost out of all proportion to that of an equally well flavored, though smaller cigar. In fact, 10 or 15 cents should procure as good a medium sized cigar as average people care to smoke. The dude’s dollar cigar is not much, if any better, except as fancy makes it so. ”

“ This was the acme of artistic skill in cigar making. Workmen of this class were rare, never more than three or four in one factory, and it was never necessary for them to remain out of work. There were men who made two, three, and four hundred cigars of the cheaper grades in a day; they had to be very fast in order to make a decent week's wages. Cigar making was a rather independent trade; the men went to work when they pleased and knocked off when they felt like doing so. As a class the workmen were careless and improvident ”

“ And so it comes about that out of the gutters and waste places of the earth there ultimately return to the manufacturer the sorry remains of the once-treasured Indian weed. Many a young hopeful of slender purse hugs with pride his penny or twopenny cigar clad in a new coat, little dreaming of its having in a former existence shone, glow-worm like, in another sphere. ”

“ Even nowadays there is some romance in the history of a cigar. In the Dutch island of Sumatra the jungle is cleared 130 away by the natives under the orders of an English manager. Chinese coolies are then imported. The estate provides each coolie with tools, tea, a barber, and sufficient cash to buy rice, fish, or pork, as well as a little over for his opium, to spend in fireworks, and to propitiate his demons.
The coolie grows the tobacco, which is bought from him and manufactured by the estate. Some of it goes to India, where it is used as the outer wrapper of cigars. ”

“ It is a custom of the manufacturers to keep a supply of the best qualities always on hand from year to year, in order that, should the tobacco crop, in any one year, be bad, the reputation of the house can be maintained by using the good tobacco in the store. The factory is a large stone building, opposite the Canipo de Moste, in which all the operations connected with cigar making are carried on (excepting the manufacture of boxes) by over five hundred operatives, all males. ”

“ The natural properties of certain classes of tobacco render them especially suited for cigar-making; others are best fitted for smoking in pipes, and there are numerous qualities which are valuable for snuff-making. National tastes and habits again frequently determine the destination of the [185] weed. Thus, heavy, full-flavoured cigars and strong pipe-tobacco are in favour in North America, while in Europe, lighter, and more brisk-burning are sought after. ”

“ Wines and spirits are now, since the imposition of a Duty only a trifle lower in price than in England, but perhaps of inferior quality. Tobacco and cigars are ridiculously cheap, but not always nasty, because of their cheapness. Anyone content to smoke a cigar of fair quality may do so at a price about fifty per cent. ”

“ To the traveler in Havana, this is easy enough, as he can there buy sample boxes from any of the factories and of any of the brands. There are, in addition to these hundreds of other cigar factories, some of which, such as Cabargos, Figaros, Luetanos, Victorias, etc., are first-class, three or four at least in whose cigars every smoker may have perfect confidence, the brands of which are known all over the world. ”

“ The value of a cigar depends, not only on the intrinsic value of the leaf, but to a great extent on the mode of manufacture. Thus, the raw material may be of good quality, but if the maker does not classify the leaves properly, or if he rolls his cigars too hard, which must vary according to the qualities of the leaves, the cigar 136will burn badly. The best-burning leaves must always be used for wrappers. ”

“ When we think of the extraordinary uses to which paper is applied, it is not so startling to learn that this material may even enter into the composition of our post-prandial cigar. If we are to believe the newspapers, millions of cigars are annually manufactured in Havana without so much as a single fibre of tobacco-leaf being utilised in the process of their fabrication. The great straw-paper factory in New York State has for some time been making a peculiar sort of extremely thin fine paper, which it has been discovered is used for making cigars. ”

“ The cultivation of the tobacco-plant in these islands is no longer authorized.
The Home manufacture of cigars from foreign leaf however increased by leaps and bounds, and now affords remunerative employment for many thousands of work-people in London alone. There are also large tobacco factories in the chief seats of industry and commerce throughout the kingdom. This is due in great measure to the heavy tax levied upon foreign made cigars imported into this country, namely, six shillings on every pound weight—i.e., double the sum charged on tobacco in the leaf. ”

“ But the most of them are young women, a class by themselves, known as cigareras, or cigar-girls. Smart at their business in the factory, they are wild as hawks and gay as larks at the bull-fight on Sundays, or the dance on the green. This is the largest establishment 72of the kind in Spain, and produces as good an article as any other, but the cigars made in Spain are not as popular with good judges as those brought directly from Cuba. The manufacturers there prefer sending the best to London, New York, or Paris, where they find a readier market for the high-priced article. ”

“ There are very few Spanish or American cigarmakers in Key West; the majority are Cubans, with a very small sprinkling of negroes. There are so many factories and so many operatives that, although it is a cigar-producing place, very few cigars indeed are sold at retail. Everybody smokes, every one invites you to smoke; cigars are almost as free as the air. It would be a paradise for a young dude who has a slender purse and who is addicted to the weed. ”