Why Montecristo Counts

Beyond the mists of myth, the lure of the Montecristo lies as much in its lore as its legendary draw.

- SHANKER GANGADHAR

The 19th-century French auteur Alexandre Dumas of Count of Monte Cristo fame smoked pot. A lot of it. But Dumas's enigmatic hero, Edmund Dantès's taste in tobacco was suitably recherché: he smoked cigars. The story of his doomed romance with Mercedes is a favourite with Cuban torcedors (rollers), and the cigar, one of the world's largest-selling brands, is named after Dantès. So popular is the novel that it is still read out in Cuba's cigar factories by lectores and lectoras-story tellers who see themselves as cultural promoters. In 1935, Alonso Menendez, who owned Montecristo and H Uppman brands, decided that his employees needed to improve their knowledge.

He picked a torcedor with a literary bent to read aloud famous books to the rollers working at their desks on exquisitely tiled floors. In the novel, Abbe tells Dantès, "To learn is not to know; there are the learners and the learned. Memory makes the one, philosophy the others." It is the philosophy of the torcedors in the halls of Habanos. So popular are lectores in cigar lore that a play set in 1929 Cuba about cigar rollers called “Anna in the Tropics” even won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 2003—unusual for a theatrical piece that did not have a Broadway premiere. In the play, a lectore reads “Anna Karenina ‘’ in a cigar factory.