Fábrica de Tabaco Partagas

"Perennial store with a large selection of premium cigars & accessories, plus a bar & smoking lounge. Factory not opened to tourists Tobacco has been grown commercially in Cuba since 1580 and, by 1700, it was the country's largest export. The Real Fábricas de Tabaco Partagás (Partagás Royal Tobacco Factory) in Havana is one of the largest and oldest cigar factories in Cuba, and is run by the state-owned tobacco company, Habanos SA. It was set up in 1845 by the Spaniard Jaime Partagás Ravelo, who owned many tobacco plantations in the Vuelta Abajo region of the Pinar del Rio province. It supplied cigars to the wealthy and noble in Europe and Asia at a time when the pleasures of the Havana cigar had become a topic of conversation for aficionados. The smell of tobacco permeates the building where 400 workers are involved in the process of producing the cigars-from sorting the leaves, through hand rolling, to packing the final product in cedar-wood boxes. There are more than eighty different stages in making a cigar, and a skilled tabaquero (cigar roller) can roll more than 100 cigars a day-frequently smoking a cigar while he or she works. The factory's main room houses workers who sit on benches rolling cigars. Partagás Ravelo is said to have initiated the practice still continued today-whereby a reader, known as the lector, sits at a lectern at the front of the room reading aloud to the cigar rollers from the local newspaper, or maybe from a novel. During the 1880s, poet, writer, and freedom fighter José Marti ensured that workers at the cigar factory were read anti-Spanish propaganda to encourage them to join the independence movement that he led. The factory continued in private ownership and, by 1958, was the second-largest exporter of Cuban cigars. After the Cuban Revolution in 1959, the tobacco industry was nationalized. The factory has since been renamed the Francisco Pérez Germán."