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Hurricanes Gustav and Ike destroyed up to 2 million pounds of Cuba's best tobacco, but reserves of the leaf should cover demand for the island's premium cigars for the next year, a tobacco executive said on Wednesday.
The storms, which struck within 10 days of each other, caused major damage to the tobacco industry infrastructure, which will require a significant investment to repair, said Manuel Garcia, vice president of cigar producer Habanos S.A.
"We think that for at least the next year we should not have great difficulties with the supply of cigars because luckily for us, we have a reserve of raw material," he said at a Havana business conference.
"Undoubtedly we are going to need an important financial injection for the tobacco (industry)," he said.
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But when Hurricane Ike blew through Cuba eight days after Hurricane Gustav's pass, Gonzalez, 35, a tobacco engineer/plantation guide at the Hoyo de Monterrey cooperative, joined an intense effort to move delicate tobacco leaves from their drying barns to stronger buildings in hopes of shielding them from the storm's fury.
Even so, more than half the crop was lost, González says. More than 3,000 tobacco leaf drying sheds and 8,600 homes for tobacco workers in the region, which lies about 112 miles southwest of Havana, also were destroyed.
''It was very, very bad,'' he said in halting English.
According to the daily newspaper Granma, Gustav alone destroyed 3,414 curing barns and damaged another 1,590. In a blow to one of Cuba's top exports, more than 800 tons of tobacco products were damaged by Gustav. The hardest hit city was Consolación del Sur, where 1,836 of the existing 1,857 curing barns were destroyed.
The Cuban government estimates losses from the two storms at $5 billion. As the island struggles to rebuild, one of the few crops that can earn the hard currency it needs to bounce back has sustained damages that experts say could linger for years to come. Cuba made $402 million from tobacco in 2007.
Gustav and Ike together delivered the worst hurricane-related blow in Cuba's storm-battered history, causing $5 billion in damages, the communist government said Monday night. . . .
In the tobacco-rich, westernmost province of Pinar del Rio, which was hit by both storms, more than 3,400 buildings used in tobacco farming and curing were destroyed, the report said. Tobacco crops were not in-season, leaving most fields empty when the hurricanes blew through, although 800 tons of tobacco were affected.
Fidel Castro likened Hurricane Gustav's destruction in Cuba to an atomic explosion, saying Wednesday it could mean billions of dollars in losses for the communist government.
Video images of the devastation on Cuba's Isla de la Juventud reminded Castro of "the desolation I saw when I visited Hiroshima, which was the victim of an attack of the first atomic bomb in August 1945," the ailing former president wrote in a column carried in government news media.
Gustav reached Category 4 strength with winds of 140 mph (220 kph) when it slammed into the outlying island on Saturday, then crossed a tobacco-rich swath of the western province of Pinar del Rio on mainland Cuba
Hurricane Ike barreled across the warm, energizing waters of the Gulf of Mexico Monday on its way toward the Texas coast after crashing through Cuba's tobacco country and toppling aging Havana buildings. . . .
Odalis Cruz, a 45-year-old housing inspector, said she evacuated to a shelter in the town's rice mill when it became clear Ike was following Gustav's path through Pinar del Rio, the westernmost province where Cuba produces tobacco used in its famous cigars.
Cuba said on Monday more than 90,000 houses were damaged or destroyed when Hurricane Gustav tore through the western province of Pinar del Rio on Saturday with 150-mile-per-hour (240-kph) winds. . . .
The top official of the ruling Communist Party in Pinar del Rio, the main growing region for Cuba's famed tobacco, said more than 4 million pounds (1.8 million kg) of the leaf, already harvested and in warehouses, had been damaged by Gustav, but that efforts were being made to salvage them.
Cuba produces about 80 million pounds (36 million kg) of tobacco annually.
There are no figures yet as to the cost of the damage from Hurricane Gustav . . .
Pinar del Rio is a mainly rural area with little industry apart from its famous tobacco fields.
The harvest was already in but the valuable leaves were being cured in flimsy thatched wooden sheds.
They were desperately trying to move half a million sacks of leaves to safer places before Gustav arrived.
But almost 1,000 tonnes of tobacco leaves still got soaked in the rain.
The price and availability of Cuban cigars could be another casualty of Hurricane Gustav.
Gustav howled into Cuba's Isla de Juventud as a monstrous Category 4 hurricane on Saturday while both Cubans and Americans scrambled to flee the path of the fast-growing storm.
Forecasters said Gustav was just short of becoming a top-scale Category 5 hurricane as it powered its way toward mainland Cuba, where authorities were hurriedly evacuating more than 240,000 people from the nation's tobacco-rich western tip. . . .
The government said it had evacuated some 190,000 people from low-lying parts of westernmost Cuba, Pinar del Rio province, where the tobacco for the island's famed cigars is grown.
Cubans emerged from their shelters to discover that the Category 4 storm had spared their lives but laid waste to vast tracts of the island's tobacco industry.
Winds of 140mph crashed into the western edge of the Caribbean island where much of the country's vital tobacco crop is grown, toppling telegraph poles and ripping off tin roofs.
Approximately 250,000 Cubans had been evacuated before Gustav crashed into Cuba's Isla de la Juventud before hitting the mainland further north at Pinar del Rio.
Gustav slammed into Cuba on Saturday afternoon, first raking over the Isle of Youth 40 miles off the southwestern coast, then coming ashore in Pinar del Rio, the island's western-most province and main tobacco region.
Cuban officials said the storm knocked over trees, damaged buildings, demolished banana plantations . . .
Ahead of the storm, workers in Cuba's prized cigar industry moved recently harvested tobacco to safety.
Friday's decree spells out details of a plan announced in March, when officials told state television they had begun lending more small plots to private producers of tobacco, coffee and other key cash crops.
Looks like it will be close, but no giant cigar, for Cuba's stogie-rolling king Jose Castelar. The 64-year-old former world-record holder has teamed up with five assistants, using nearly 93 pounds (42 kilograms) of top-quality tobacco to assemble a 98-foot (30-meter) cigar.
Castelar set Guinness Records for the world's longest cigars in 2001, 2003 and April 2005, when he completed a stogie measuring 20.41 meters, just shy of 67 feet. On Tuesday, he said he is shooting for a fourth title.
But Castelar, who learned the art of cigar-making from an uncle at age 5, is likely to fall short this time: Guinness says Puerto Rican cigar-maker Patricio Pena crafted a whopping 41.2-meter (135-foot) stogie last year.
Jose Castelar began rolling cigars when he was five. Now, at 64, the Cuban expert hopes to finish rolling a 20-meter (65-foot) stogie by Wednesday to garner his fourth world record from the Guinness Book.
"I can't tell you exactly how far I'll get, but my goal is to beat my former record of 20.41 meters (66.9 feet)," Castelar, knicknamed "Cueto," told AFP on Sunday.
He rolls his mega-cigar out of premium tobacco leaves, making a long, slender tube about 4 centimeters (1.6 inches) across. He works non-stop, eight hours a day since he began his record-seeking attempt on Saturday.
HAVANA: Looks like it will be close, but no giant cigar, for Cuba's stogie-rolling king Jose Castelar.
The 64-year-old former world-record holder has teamed up with five assistants, using nearly 93 pounds (42 kilograms) of top-quality tobacco to assemble a 98-foot (30-meter) cigar.
Castelar set Guinness Records for the world's longest cigars in 2001, 2003 and April 2005
I know how this sounds, but I live in Havana and I don't smoke cigars. I'm clueless about them, actually. Even the cutting thingy that trims off the tip is a mystery. . . .
That's why I decided to embark on a cigar crash course, learning what makes Cubans some of the finest cigars in the world.
"If you're interested in cigars, we're already friends," says James Suckling, Cigar Aficionado Magazine's "Man in Havana." . . .
I smoke the Cohiba under a shade tree in Old Havana's stately Plaza de Armas. It has the strongest smell of any cigar I've sampled. It's easily my favorite, with a hint of coffee and an electric-metallic taste that leaves my tongue feeling numb, perhaps from the nicotine. . . .
My crash course is over and I'm still not sure what cigar fans mean when they say things like that. Guess it's time to buy some more cigars and find out.