Some People Meditate. Others Smoke Cigars.

The cigar shop has always felt like a shrine to adulthood, a space where the experienced could indulge in acquired tastes and the sophisticated could develop new ways of sitting and thinking, and sometimes talking – but only sometimes. For the most part, the grownups would relax.

This is not a hookah bar, with all the fiddling around with hoses, coals and shared bowls. It decidedly has nothing to do with vaping, black-light posters or CBD oil.

No, the cigar shop looks about the same today as it would have in 1921 or 1721. Legendary cigar smoker Samuel Clemens, aka Mark Twain, is quoted as saying, “If smoking is not allowed in heaven, I shall not go,” among many other adulations to his favorite past times.

And business, despite everything, is still booming.

“2020 was a record year,” said Harris Safra, owner of Xavier’s Cigar Lounge in Hallandale Beach. “Even when the lounge was closed, I stayed open in the back and let people in to purchase cigars. Instead of buying one or two cigars and smoking them in the lounge, people would buy six or seven and leave.”

Ana Cuenca, who runs Cuenca Cigars in Hollywood with her life partner Miguel, saw the last year as a challenge, but one they rallied to overcome.

“We’ve been moving our cigar shop to the next level and 2020 was supposed to be the one year we would produce the results. But things can change from one day to another,” she said. “Suddenly we were ordered to close the shop. We were not allowed to even have curbside pickup.”

She said the hardest part was seeing their Harrison Street location dark and the outside patio empty, with no one playing dominoes or sipping wine, no laughs or shouting or drama.

“I am a Cuban rafter, so, to me, adversity is one thing I know how to deal with. All that got me extremely depressed,” said Cuenca. “But our feisty spirit kicks us back. We decided to start a massive inventory of the shop and to focus on online sales.

“Thank God, I’d been working on our online platform since 2006 and now it was about to pay back. And it worked. In no time we were extremely busy fulfilling online orders.”

The strength of the cigar shop is the community that it fosters.

Safra describes himself as “an enthusiast, not an aficionado,” who jumped at the opportunity to open his own cigar shop seven years ago. The attraction back then was the same as it is now.

“When you smoke, you relax. It’s a very relaxing pastime,” Safra said. “People become friends. They sit around, they talk about their ailments, they talk about absolutely everything. We order lunch, we talk and we eat.”

Cigars today are much the same as they were in 1492, when Christopher Columbus first spotted indigenous Americans rolling broad-leaved herbs and lighting them on fire to hold the smoke in their mouths, which made them slightly relaxed and ever so slightly intoxicated.

The strange custom caught on with the crew, so much so that one of the Santa Maria sailors, Rodrigo de Jerez, brought his own hand-rolled cigars home to Spain. Local inquisitors saw him breathing smoke out of his mouth and nose and promptly tossed him in jail under suspicion of consorting with Satan. Regardless, within a few years tobacco became a prized cash crop – and cigar shops became an alternative to boisterous, beer-soaked taverns. 

“People that come to cigar shops usually don't like bars,” explained Cuenca. “They do drink, but it is more in a social way. They pair drinks with cigars and they love nice conversations.”

While other industries became, well, industrialized, cigar shops have always thrived as small, intimate spaces. 

“Cuenca Cigars has been open since 2006 and we have customers that have been coming to our shop all those 15 years,” said Cuenca. “We know their families, some of their issues and we have aged together. It's like a dysfunctional family glued together by cultural confrontations, political views and love.

”The one thing that makes a cigar shop different from any other retail shop is the fact that the majority of the manufacturers that provide you with the cigars for sale are themselves family-owned small or medium-sized businesses. The product we, as retailers, are purchasing comes from those manufacturers, who invest a lot of time, passion and sacrifice to produce a short-life product that’s totally handmade and natural.

”The person behind the counter is not an ordinary employee but someone who shares the passion for cigars!”

Cuba, of course, is renowned for its cigar production, and some of Miami’s best makers and retailers can be found in Little Havana. But one of America’s most renowned labels, Cremo Cigars – which was founded in 1898 – has an address in Overtown. Since 2010, it’s been helmed by Walter “Lilo” Santiago.

“Years ago, when I first arrived in Miami, I took a walk down Calle Ocho in Little Havana,” Santiago recalled. “The clanking of the dominoes and the rich smell of lit cigars enticed me to indulge in one myself.”

Ever since then, he’s been dedicated to making the old Cremo brand a world-class name once again, largely based on its local flavor. Of course, in Miami, that means a blend of America and the Caribbean.

The Cremo website explains it thusly: “Essential to our finest cigar-making pledge is the commitment to Cuban-style construction, an island flavor achieved primarily through the employment of Cuban-born, Level-9 cigar rollers.”

But behind that is a more personal sentiment. Said Sandy Cobas, whose El Titan de Bronze fabriquita rolled some of Santiago’s first cigars, “In order for me to make a cigar for someone, I have to like you. I have to get to know you, get to know what your flavor is, and we have to click. If we don’t click, it’s not there.”

Cremo teamed up with Miami artist Néstor Parets Selva to custom-paint cigar boxes for special clients. In an interview with Kcull Gallery, Selva said the project woke up old memories from his hometown of Baracoa, Cuba.

“It brought me back so vividly to the farming of tobacco, those fields where everything becomes art,” he shared. “From the early treatment of the leaves, the worker’s conscientiousness in the tobacco houses, to the actual cigar rolling or torcedura – expert hands transforming the physicality of leaves into what will be an utter explosion of the senses, smell, taste, eyesight, touch – and, of course, the smoking that marks the joyful finale.”