CUBA: Men v. Machines

Machine-made cigars have been old stuff in the U.S. ever since the late George Washington Hill, master huckster, coined the advertising slogan, “SPIT is a horrid word, but it’s worse on the end of your cigar.” Until Hill and his machine-made Cremos, the U.S. had happily smoked stogies rolled by hand. It was Hill’s contention that cigar makers’ saliva held the stogies together at their tip, but cigar makers insisted that they used vegetable gum.

In the home of fine Havana tobaccos, Hill is not honored. There is nothing in the world, say the Cubans, like the coronas, perfectos and panatelas rolled by the torcedores of their capital city, men who have inherited jobs and skills from fathers and grandfathers, and who hire “readers” to sit in their midst and recite CalderÓn, Cervantes and Marx to them as they work.

Yet machine competition from abroad has been stiff: one machine can turn out cigars 25 times as fast as a practiced torcedor. Cuba’s cigar output has been falling, and cigar makers have been out of work. Last year the hard-pressed Cuban Cigar Makers Union, in an attempt to revive the industry’s prosperity, agreed to the introduction of machines.

But union and management reckoned without Cuba’s thousands of one-room cigar makers. Convinced that their livelihood was at stake, these small independents rose last week in rebellion. Many other Cubans joined in their protest. In the central province of Santa Clara, crowds seized 14 town halls, often with the enthusiastic consent of mayors and aldermen. In Placetas, 5,000 marched through the streets shouting: “Down with mechanization!”

Order was restored only when President Carlos Prio Socarrás promised that local markets would be safe for handwork. Hereafter, he decreed, machine-made cigars would be for export only. The big companies, which had already installed 29 machines (displacing 768 workers) and ordered 12 more, refused to accept Prio’s decision as final. “Now that we have invested our money,” wailed one big producer, “we would be forced to close if this is definitive. Our export market is not large enough to take our full machine output. We need 20% of the home market besides.” The battle of men V. machines was not yet over.