Cigar smoking used to be a smelly habit pursued by portly businessmen and favorite uncles. But in the last several years, cigars have become trendy with all age groups. It's a trend marked by unprecedented sales, an explosion of cigar magazines, shops and even nightclubs.
The most popular, and expensive, of the cigars are Cuban and the growing demand for Cuban product has created a flood of phoney cigars. Some police estimates say 80 per cent of the Cuban cigars sold in Canada are fakes. And what passes as tobacco in some of these cigars would make the most dedicated puffer think twice.
The police and the cigar industry are doing to make the counterfeiters butt out.
Cuba is the largest island in the Caribbean and a mecca for Canadian tourists. Within walking distance of the centre of old Havana are the world's most famous cigar factories producing Romeo and Juliettas, Monte Cristos, and Cohibas; Cadillac cigars that can cost up to $85 each. A box can sell for $2,000.
Folklore has it that to be considered the real thing, Cuban cigars must rolled on the thighs of nubile virgins. In fact, they're produced in half a dozen five-story factories, each floor of which is dedicated to a specific aspect of the creation of the authentic Cuban cigar. Each cigar is the product of 192 separate tasks, all done by hand. The most critical is the actual rolling.
Cuba's prime tobacco fields are surrounded by terrain Steven Spielberg considered using as the location to shoot Jurassic Park. There's not much land here: maybe the equivalent of a few farms in Saskatchewan. Only a handful of skilled farmers really know how to work the land. But even the world's best tobacco growers can't meet the insatiable demand for Cuban cigars, a demand that has quadrupled in the last decade. A demand that's also created a world-wide black market in fakes and an international network of counterfeiters.
Far from the sights featured in a tourist guide, a shadowy world of underground commerce thrives in the back streets of old Havana. Illegal factories produce fake cigars. As for the raw material, much of it is stolen from the legitimate factories, tobacco leaves swept from the floor, cigar bands, finished cigars, the company seals, and even the cedar boxes. It's risky business. If caught, inside workers can lose their jobs. A casual security check at the door is supposed to stop theft, but for many Cubans earning a monthly wage of 200 pesos (CDN$13) the temptation to get in on the action is irresistible.
For Canadian tourists arriving in Cuba, buying cigars on the street looks like a bargain. People sell top-notch cigars at fire-sale prices. New laws in Cuba could put these hustlers behind bars for five years. But it's worth the risk; there's lots of money to be made. A box of Cuban cigars bought on the streets of old Havana for CDN$70 can fetch up to $2,000 in Canada. The amount of money to be made is so immense that police in Cuba and Canada compare it to drug smuggling. But the risk of being penalized is far lower.
The traffic in phoney cigars is so big that professional couriers ("mules" they're called) smuggle them out on passenger planes or aboard ships leaving Havana heading for Montreal, Vancouver and Halifax. Canadian police are tight-lipped about Mafia involvement, but Cuban authorities have identified channels being used to export large shipments of fake cigars as those used by drug smugglers.
At Toronto's Pearson International Airport, the priority for Canada Customs is drugs. Seven million people go through there in one year, and officers have about 90 seconds to make a decision about each one. The odds favour the cigar smugglers. But if they're caught, Canada Customs warns it can be serious. The goods will be seized and charges will be laid. To date though, no Canadians are behind
bars for doing a little dealing in Cuban cigars. In Cuba, tough new laws have put 100 Cuban smugglers in jail, but haven't stopped a brisk underground trade.
With the exclusive right to sell Cuban cigars in Canada, Abel Ortego is a powerful man. He supplies all Canadian retailers with Cuba's only luxury export. Based in Toronto, he heads Havana House and sells three million cigars a year. Mr. Ortego estimates that 80,000 to 100,000 boxes of fake Cuban cigars find their way into the Canadian market each year. A black market that cost $52 million a year in lost taxes alone. He says fake cigar are done out of factories by non-skilled rollers using second-class tobacco. Or anything else you can name.
Around the Newmarket RCMP detachment in Ontario, Corporal Don Cooke is known as the cigar guru. He believes that 80 per cent of the Cuban cigars sold in Canada are either counterfeit or non-duty paid cigars. He has seen cigars made of toilet paper, paper, banana leaves, and cockroaches. Cigars we bought in a Toronto corner convenience store and had examined by Revenue Canada's Forensic Lab contained cotton and synthetic fibres, a live insect and a larvae (Lazioderma Serracona) - not a health risk, we were assured.
In search of the real thing, a box of authentic Cuban cigars for sale in Canada, we arbitrarily picked Calgary and a reputable dealer who buys all his Cuban cigars in good faith from Havana House, the legitimate supplier in Toronto. We bought a box of 25 Monte Cristo cigars, the most popular brand in the world. Completely sealed, with all the right stamps certifying its authenticity, we paid the full price of $420 plus taxes. We got the number two man in charge of world distribution in Cuba to pick a cigar at random. He declared it a fake.
When we asked Abel Ortego of Havana House about this box of cigars, he smoked one, which he said was the real thing. The other cigar, he said, didn't belong to that box at all. Although he doesn't know where the switch could have occurred, he suggested it could have occurred at the factory before the box was sealed.
So it seems the cigar industry, the pride of Cuba, has fallen victim to its own success, as counterfeiters cash in on a tradition going back generations.
