The Storm
Night had fallen in San Luís, Cuba, on September 27, 2022. Tobacco farmer Hirochi Robaina knew a hurricane was coming, but hurricanes are part of living in Cuba, especially Pinar del Río. In this westernmost area of the country, home to Cuba’s finest tobacco lands, storms are frequent. Robaina did what he always did—he moved his wife and young daughter away from the farm and prepared to hunker down under his ranchón, a tall structure where he has hosted friends and family for meals and cigars for decades. He wasn’t worried.
“Through my whole life, I have been through every hurricane. I prepare a few cigars to smoke, have a bottle of rum, have a seat and wait,” he says. After a while, he realized this was not just any storm.
“I felt the roof moving—it was being lifted by the wind,” he says. “I didn’t believe it.” The thatched roof had survived plenty of storms, but this time it wasn’t going to hold. He ran into his concrete-block home with one of his workers, then realized he didn’t have his dog. He went out into the tempest to get his pet. “I treat that dog like a son,” he says. When he finally found him, they all hunkered down.
Ten minutes later, the roof of the ranchón was swept away with winds as high as 129 miles an hour. Then the lights went out, leaving Robaina in the dark as the wind howled and the sound of wood being crushed filled the air. “The only thing that remained here was the floor,” he says. “It took away everything.”
He wasn’t alone. About 20 minutes away, in the tobacco town of San Juan y Martínez, Iván Máximo Pérez Maseda was in his home with his family on his tobacco farm. “It was just an event of total destruction,” he says. “The hurricane was very intense, and it crossed right over the farm.” He’s lived on the property for nearly his entire 54-year life and he has never seen the storm’s equal. “All the structures, everything was taken down,” he says. The only thing to survive was his home, built from concrete. “Thank God, we managed to get through it.”
The storm was Hurricane Ian. It cut across Cuba like a buzzsaw, moving north across Pinar del Río as a category three storm. In its path were Cuba’s most valued tobacco lands. Ian tore the roofs off an estimated 100,000 homes, killed five, temporarily blacked out the entire island and leveled 10,000 of the nation’s tobacco curing barns—roughly 90 percent of those in the entire country. Ian would emerge from Cuba, strengthen even further and go on to make landfall in Florida, killing 150 and causing severe flooding. It was ultimately one of the most powerful storms to strike the United States.
In the United States, rebuilding after a hurricane is quick. In Cuba, that’s not the case. Shortages of wood, nails and every imaginable thing slow the reconstruction process, and Ian’s destruction resulted in 2022-23 being one of the smallest crops in memory, with fewer than 13,000 acres planted, according to the Cuban news outlet Granma, rather than the intended 28,000. Casas del tabaco, or curing barns, are wooden structures that shelter harvested tobacco leaves and allow them to cure over a period of about 45 days, a process in which moisture goes into and out of the hanging leaves, and it’s absolutely critical to producing quality tobacco. Any tobacco farmer will tell you that a perfect crop in the field can be destroyed in a barn. Without barns, you can’t harvest cigar tobacco properly.
On a visit to Pinar del Río in February, nearly a year and a half after Ian, its scars remain. Some barns are still wrecks, piles of shredded wood. Many have been rebuilt—some in makeshift fashion: wooden walls replaced with tarps or the corrugated tin typically used for roofing. Some royal palm trees lie on the ground; others, stripped of their tops, are merely stalks pointing to the sky.
Facing a shortage, Cuba’s tobacco industry focused on its most favored farms as it simply didn’t have the materials to rebuild everything at the same time. Hector Luís Prieto said in April 2023 that his barns were all rebuilt. “I have recovered 100 percent, thanks to a lot of work and ,” he told Cigar Aficionado.
At the recent Habanos Festival, Jorge Pérez Martel, commercial vice president of Habanos, said Ian’s main impact was on tobacco houses. “We started doing actions to reanimate everything that was destroyed by the hurricane and today we have a great part of this infrastructure operating 100 percent. There are still some minimally damaged areas, and, as it has been published in the press, with mainly issues related to construction. Tabacuba [Cuba’s tobacco management arm] has a policy to concentrate production on all the tobacco growers with more tradition and better yields in production.”
On Máximo’s farm, one barn has been entirely rebuilt, but others remain in ruins. Looking at the wreckage, one might think some things could be salvaged. Máximo shakes his head. The crushed wooden boards cannot be used again. Even the wooden cujes—long sticks used to hang leaves—were snapped or rotted when left outside, so those are in short supply too. And with the extent and power of this particular storm, getting things back to normal is a daunting process. “I’m about 60 percent recovered,” says Máximo, while walking his farm. “Maybe this year I will be up to 100 percent capacity.”
Ian was hardly the first hurricane to hit this region. In 2008, back-to-back storms in the area caused an estimated $5 billion in damages, according to press reports. In 2023, a storm named Idalia followed nearly an identical path to Ian, thankfully with weaker winds, and it hampered the rebuilding. One of the beauties of this part of Cuba is also its bane. It is positioned in warm waters, the Gulf of Mexico to the west and north and the Caribbean Sea to the south. Warm waters are fuel for hurricanes.
On Robaina’s farm, the rebuilding is not yet complete. He had five barns, but now has one large one—with concrete s. “No more wood,” he says. Workers with grind saws cut steel reinforcing bars to length as the construction goes on, the wreck of a curing barn still sits as a sign of what happens when nature bears her fangs. One of the few things left unscathed here is a metal statue of his legendary grandfather, Alejandro, who lived on this farm until his death in 2010. His image still sits, heavy and strong, in a chair, welcoming guests to sit down next to him.
Robaina’s ranchón has been rebuilt, stronger, with an iron skeleton instead of wood, concrete footings and a zinc roof in place of thatch. He’s ready for when the winds return.
