If I still smoked I would have lit up that bad boy.
My cop-friend, Rick, periodically goes to Miami on his day off to relax and savor the cultural delights of Little Havana, an area in Miami where Cuban-Americans live, work and enjoy their lives in a free country. Being relatively new to south Florida Rick invited me and my Canon Xsi digital camera along for the ride. He picked me up several hours after the morning rush hour in his freshly washed 2005 Corvette convertible, which seemed a bit unwise considering the reputation of the area we’d be in. But hey, he’s the cop AND a Fort Lauderdale native so I was pretty sure he knew the risks. A few dozen blocks west of downtown Miami the neighborhood we drove through had bars on apartment windows, groups of men lounging on their steps talking, and every store we passed had signs in Spanish, ONLY Spanish. It was as if we had crossed through to a parallel dimension and were transported to another country and time. Rick parked on Calle Ocho (8th Street) in front of a store where a man chewing on a toothpick leaned casually against the doorway, looked at me and slowly nodded. We crossed the street to El Pub Restaurant and savored an authentic Cuban lunch followed by an espresso shot of Cuban
coffee, my first, ever. Rick ordered two more “to-go” and we walked a few doors down the block to a store with a wooden Indian statue and a wooden chair beside it, as if to give the Indian a place to rest if he chose. A man in a white hat, white trousers and white shirt greeted Rick warmly although no words were spoken between the two friends. Rick offered him the styrofoam cup of espresso and the man offered Rick a cigar. It was clear the exchange was a well-honed tradition. The man lit Rick’s cigar first then his own. As Rick puffed he explained the origins of the cigar store, the identity of the man in white and how tobacco can be compared to wine in many ways. We visited two more cigar stores that afternoon, each of which had a distinctly different “flavor”.
I quit smoking cigarettes cold-turkey nearly seven years ago after discovering a former smoking buddy had terminal stage four lung cancer. I haven’t had one puff since. But after visiting the cigar stores in south Florida, where tobacco grown from Cuban seeds is rolled by Cuban workers in the traditional Cuban style, just for a minute, I wished I could smoke again. Perhaps if I live to be 100 I’ll go down to Little Havana and enjoy a Cuban-style American cigar. Or maybe by then travel to Cuba will be allowed for all American citizens, not just those of Cuban heritage, and I’ll have an actual Cuban in Cuba.