History of cigars – II
Soon there was a demand for higher quality product in Europe, and Spanish ones were superseded by those made in Cuba, which was then a Spanish colony, where production had started during the mid-18th century. Cigars, European smokers discovered, traveled better than tobacco. They probably arrived in North America in 1762, when Israel Putnam, later an American general in the American War of Independence (1774-1778), returned from Cuba, where he had served in the British army. He came back to his home in Connecticut, where tobacco had been grown by settlers since the 17th century, with a selection of Havana cigars and large amounts of Cuban tobacco seed. Factories were later set up in the Connecticut area, processing the tobacco grown from the Cuban seed. In the early 19th century American domestic production started to take off and Cubans also began to be imported in significant numbers. But cigar smoking did not really boom in the United States until around the time of the Civil War in the 1860s, with individual brands emerging by the late 19th century. By then the cigar had become a status symbol in the United States.
During the same period, smoking had become so popular among gentlemen in Britain and France that European trains introduced smoking cars to accommodate them, and hotels and clubs boasted smoking rooms. The after-dinner stogie, accompanied by glasses of port or brandy, also became a tradition. This ritual was given an added boost by the fact that the Prince of Wales, the future Edward VII and a leader of fashion, was a devotee, much to the annoyance of his mother, Queen Victoria, who disliked smoking.
Cigarettes first appeared on the scene in the early 19th century as a cheap alternative. The introduction of cigarette-making machines, in the 1880s, accelerated the growth in popularity of this form of smoking, which had become dominant by World War I.
As a response, the production of machine-made cigars began in Cuba in the 1920s, after which both the manufacture and smoking of handmade ones fell into a slow but steady decline.
Smoking in general has, of course, become much less popular since the publication of the American Surgeon General’s report on its effects on health in the early 1960s. But since the early 1990s, there has been a major revival in the popularity of handmade product: they have become chic once more, thanks to the enthusiasm shown for them by stars, such as Arnold Schwarzenegger, James Woods, Jack Nicholson, Sharon Stone, Demi Moore and model Linda Evangelista, demonstrating that, among the rich and famous, cigars are just as popular as ever.