Don Alejandro Robaina: Le parrain du tabac cubain
There are men who are spoken of little, yet without whom we would not be able to enjoy our precious cigars. We are, of course, referring to premium tobacco growers. Among them, one man stood out above all others and left his mark on the history of Cuban tobacco. That man was Alejandro Robaina. An exceptional grower, he spent more than eighty years producing what many experts consider to be the finest tobacco in the world. Nicknamed the “godfather of Cuban tobacco,” he is also the only tobacco grower to have had a cigar brand named after him.
A family legacy
Born in 1919 in Alquizar, a small municipality in the Cuban province of Artemisa, Alejandro Robaina spent most of his life on the plantations of the province of Pinar del Rio. The son of the famous tobacco grower Maruto Robaina, he grew up in a family of farmers established in the Vuelta Abajo region since 1845. At the age of ten, he began working in his father’s plantations, just one year after smoking his first cigar. It was only in 1951, upon Maruto’s death, that Alejandro took over the family business. Until the Cuban Revolution, he continued to sell his tobacco stocks to American brokers. From the outset, Alejandro stood out for his expertise and business sense. In 1959, while the majority of Cuban plantations were transformed into cooperatives, he obtained permission from the Cuban government to retain ownership of his land. In an interview given to Cigar Aficionado magazine in 2006[1], he stated that he had told Fidel Castro that he did not like state farms and that “the best way to grow tobacco was family production.”
[1] Cuba’s Cigar Legend, Alejandro Robaina, by James Suckling, Cigar Aficionado, July/August 2006.
An exceptional grower
Thanks to the know-how inherited from his ancestors and his passion for tobacco, Alejandro Robaina quickly distinguished himself as one of Cuba’s finest growers. Specializing in wrapper-leaf cultivation, he cultivated more than 16 hectares of land on the famous plantation “Finca el Pinar” located in Cuchillas de Barbacoa, in the municipality of San Juan y Martínez. His tobacco could thus be found in many premium cigars, such as the Hoyo de Monterrey Epicure Especial and the Cohiba Espléndidos.
In addition to being named “Cuba’s best tobacco producer” by the Cuban government, Robaina was one of the most productive tobacco growers of his generation. Under normal conditions, he was able to achieve yields ranging from 82% to 68%, while most farmers were content with yields between 10% and 20%. For the record, yield refers to the number of harvested and cured tobacco leaves that meet the high-quality standards required to make premium cigars.
According to him, the worst yield he ever knew was 36%. That year, disastrous weather conditions caused excessive humidity in the barns and much of the crop was destroyed. Yet even with a yield of only 36%, Robaina far outperformed the production of other growers in his region. That same year, most Cuban tobacco producers achieved a yield of only between 0.8% and 4%.
Despite his particularly favorable results, Alejandro Robaina never based the quality of his work on his yield rate. For him, the most important thing is the quality of the tobacco leaves produced. He explained that, unlike what many growers think, the best seeds are not necessarily the most profitable. In his view, “a lot and good do not go together.” While he had been one of the first growers to cultivate the Habanos 2000 variety, he gradually abandoned that seed in favor of Criollo 98 and Corojo 99, which he considered to be of much better quality. In the interview he gave to Cigar Aficionado in 2006, he also said that he had wanted to replant the old traditional Corojo variety, which he described as “the best filler tobacco on the market” despite its low yield. In 1997, the state-owned company Habanos S.A. honored Alejandro’s work by creating the Vegas Robaina cigar brand. It is the only Cuban cigar brand to bear the name of a grower.
Love of the land
According to Robaina, the success of his plantations comes down to two main reasons: working as a family and a love of the land. A fervent advocate of independent farming, he believes that working together as a family helps preserve traditions and ancestral know-how. While many growers use pesticides to protect their crops from diseases such as black shank, Robaina carefully prepares his fields and continues to apply ancestral techniques such as salting the fields after a period of heavy rain or fertilizing the soil with ground peanuts. He also uses only organic seedlings and organic fertilizers.
That said, the farmer knows that certain contemporary techniques deserve consideration. In the Cuchillas de Barbacoa plantations, the old thus stands alongside the modern. Next to the rudimentary structures and ox-drawn plows are more modern facilities such as controlled curing barns and drip irrigation. Robaina also uses a precision instrument bought in Japan that measures the maturity of the leaves and indicates whether the soil is lacking nutrients.
The future of the Robaina plantations
In 2010, Alejandro Robaina died of cancer. But his death did not mark the end of Robaina tobacco. As early as the early 1990s, he named his grandson Hiroshi as his successor to ensure the continuity of the family legacy. Chosen for his work ethic, Hiroshi worked in the Partagas and H. Upmann factories before joining his grandfather on the family plantations. Today, he manages the plantations with the help of his father.
In September 2022, Hurricane Ian destroyed every single drying barn on the Robaina estate. Faced with this unprecedented disaster, Hiroshi admits he considered converting his land to grow beans and vegetables. But his passion for tobacco and his determination to uphold a family tradition more than a century old changed his mind. Only 2 hectares were cultivated this year out of the 16 hectares that make up the plantation. But those few hectares bear witness to the passion and determination that drive the Robaina heir. They also show that the Robaina legend is far from fading away.