Paddle Through A Land Of Vivid Colours...

Paddle Through A Land Of Vivid Colours...

- Mike Maceacheran 

1. Miami

Head west of South Beach to Little Havana to meet cigar makers, domino players, and musicians who practise the pastimes of their former homeland

IT’S EARLY ON SUNDAY morning and the day’s work has begun in earnest. At four antique wooden desks, men and women are tightly rolling thinly pressed cocoa brown tobacco leaves by hand, snipping the frayed edges with blades, before placing each one into a cicada-shaped mould. The air is bitterly thick, a film noir fug of dry smoke and smouldering match ends, the workshop furnished with Havana Cola bottles, Catholic figurines, and hundreds of stacked boxes, each one bearing the stamp of the Cuba Tobacco Cigar Company. Apart from the tin-crackle from a vintage radio playing merengue hits, the only sound is the languorous, measured puff of cigars.

‘My father introduced me to cigars when I was seven,’ says owner Pedro Bello Jr, as he strolls around the emporium’s shop floor, proudly displaying sepia prints of the family dynasty, which began in Havana in 1896. Transported to Miami after the Cuban Revolution in 1959, Pedro explains, the workshop remains the only Cuban-seed cigar factory in the neighbourhood, and the only one owned by a Havana family. Sat outside on the pavement, Pedro’s father Don Pedro Bello taps his silver lighter in agreement, lighting up his fifth cigar of the morning. He is dressed in a trimmed Stetson and chalky double-cuff shirt and his scuffed black shoes are flecked with ash, his piercing eyes hazed-over with smoke. In his breast pocket, a buckshot-thick cigar pokes out for later, on its nib a gold and maroon crest. ‘Hecho en Cuba,’ he whispers: made in Cuba.