The old days were always better ......right?

[El Presidente]

1884 

 

Cigars and Bird Droppings

In Cuba the smokers keep posted about the crop each year, and at one time they abandon a leading brand from a plantation that has turned out a poor crop and take to the goods of a plantation that may have had no reputation at all in the past. To be sure it used not to be so. Tobacco grown in the historic Vuelta Abajo was for nearly a century even in quality and extraordinarily good. The world had failed to produce anything to compare to it. Sir Walter Raleigh couldn’t even imagine that the Indian tobacco he exhibited before Queen Bess existed in so far more perfect form in the valley of western Cuba. 

    But the soil got tired, or the planters thought it did. Farm owners began to doctor it with fertilizers. Worst of all, they began to groom it with guano. Guano is all right for the rude potato or the hardy corn stalk, but tobacco is a delicate plant, a sensitive woman among vegetables. It is affected strongly by little things. When guano was put within its reach it grew better, but it drank up the acrid, bitter, strong, harsh essence of the drug, and its leaves, when made into cigars, reeked with the unpleasant taste and odor. 

    The planters came pretty near ruining their gold-producing geese. In years they have not all of them been able to undo the mischief. Now that it has been discovered that fertilizers are not nice to smoke, the planters are not certain what to do. The Vuelta Abajo is not by any means what it used to be, and Cuban gentlemen are loudly complaining that they cannot buy anything like the cigars they once were accustomed to. 

    The situation is serious, but not alarming. Cuba is without a competitor in fine leaf production, and only one-third of the great island is under cultivation. There is plenty more good land there, and the same exquisite care, incessant attention, wide experience, and delicate skill that made the Vuelta Abajo the tobacco garden on the world will do as much for neighboring land when poor Cuba shakes off the misrule that makes her today the most pitiable spectacle the earth beholds.

 

http://cigarhistory.info/Cuba/Cuban_smokers_1884.html

[Hemclas]

Interesting information, thanks for sharing.

 

[asudevil08]

...the more they stay the same...