When Cuban immigrants moved to this city in the early 1980s, they brought with them their language and traditions, and their love for good, affordable cigars.
Soon several little storefront tabaquerias cropped up, with an owner and maybe an assistant hand-rolling cigars in the back, then selling them from a counter in front.
But today, while Spanish is still commonly heard -- although often studded with the cadences of New Jersey -- the region's cigar makers are fading into memory.
PHOTO: AFP
Jose Suarez's Boquilla Cigar Shop on Bergenline Avenue may be the last such shop in Union City. Cuba Aliados Cigars still has a retail presence but moved its production to Honduras more than a decade ago.
street sales
Now 72, Suarez said his trade has been assailed by high tobacco taxes and the unregulated street sales of premium cigars.
"I'm fighting, trying to maintain my business," Suarez said. "But if things continue as they have, I might have to close, too."
The older gents who used to favor the US$2 cigars most popular at La Boquilla are dying off. The new generation of aficionados favor posh shops selling premium cigars at several times that price -- usually hand-rolled in Honduras, the Dominican Republic, or other climes closer to tobacco fields and inexpensive labor.
Union City's Cuban population has declined substantially in the past quarter-century. Emilio del Valle, a top municipal staffer and founder of the Cuban Day Parade, said Cubans peaked between 60 to 70 percent of the city's population in the 1980s. According to 2000 Census data, 14 percent of Union City's 80,589 documented residents claim Cuban ancestry. Hispanics as a whole comprise 75 percent. Within one block of Suarez's shop are restaurants and bakeries proclaiming heritage from Guatemala, Peru, Mexico and Ecuador.
And in the US, there's scarcity of would-be tabaquero apprentices wanting to learn the painstaking but poor-paying craft of cigar rolling.
"It's not surprising they're having difficulties," said Norman Sharp, of the decline of the storefront cigar makers. Sharp is president of the Cigar Association of America, which represents cigar makers, importers and suppliers. "It stopped being economical to hand-roll cigars in this country decades ago."
Machines began replacing human hands in the 1950s. In the US, Sharp said, 94 percent of the cigars sold are machine-made in such factories as Swisher in Jacksonville, Florida, and John Middleton in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania.
popular with police
At Jimenez Tobacco in downtown Newark, New York; Nelda Pozo and an assistant roll a slightly pricier variety of cigars that are popular with police officers and lawyers frequenting the nearby courthouses. While the business supports her as it did her family for a century earlier in eastern Cuba, Pozo said her now-grown children have pursued other careers. So, too, has Suarez's stepson.
Back in Union City, Suarez continues alone the trade he began learning at age 11 in Placetas, Cuba. One large tobacco leaf acts as a binder around bits of specially aged tobacco, while a second trimmed leaf provides the outer wrapper. The cigars are then stacked and pressed in decades-old wooden boxes. Suarez said he produces about 150 cigars in an eight-hour day.
Despite its name, Boquilla's top-selling Havana brand is a blend of tobaccos from the Dominican Republic, Honduras, Ecuador and Indonesia. The mythic Cuban leaf has not been legally imported into the US since President Kennedy imposed an embargo in 1962.
While cigars allegedly smuggled from Cuba are sold illicitly on the streets of Union City, Suarez said many are fakes. And even authentic Cuban tobacco is not of the quality he recalls before Fidel Castro nationalized the industry.
"It's not bad, but it's not good, either," he said. But mystique sells. Despite his distaste for Castro, if Cuban tobacco were to become legally available, Suarez said he'd sell it -- "because people are always asking for it."
When Shanghai-based designer Guo Qingshan posted a vacation photo on Valentine’s Day and captioned it “Puppy Mountain,” it became a sensation in China and even created a tourist destination. Guo had gone on a hike while visiting his hometown of Yichang in central China’s Hubei Province late last month. When reviewing the photographs, he saw something he had not noticed before: A mountain shaped like a dog’s head rested on the ground next to the Yangtze River, its snout perched at the water’s edge. “It was so magical and cute. I was so excited and happy when I discovered it,” Guo said.
TURNAROUND: The Liberal Party had trailed the Conservatives by a wide margin, but that was before Trump threatened to make Canada the US’ 51st state Canada’s ruling Liberals, who a few weeks ago looked certain to lose an election this year, are mounting a major comeback amid the threat of US tariffs and are tied with their rival Conservatives, according to three new polls. An Ipsos survey released late on Tuesday showed that the left-leaning Liberals have 38 percent public support and the official opposition center-right Conservatives have 36 percent. The Liberals have overturned a 26-point deficit in six weeks, and run advertisements comparing the Conservative leader to Trump. The Conservative strategy had long been to attack unpopular Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, but last month he
Chinese authorities said they began live-fire exercises in the Gulf of Tonkin on Monday, only days after Vietnam announced a new line marking what it considers its territory in the body of water between the nations. The Chinese Maritime Safety Administration said the exercises would be focused on the Beibu Gulf area, closer to the Chinese side of the Gulf of Tonkin, and would run until tomorrow evening. It gave no further details, but the drills follow an announcement last week by Vietnam establishing a baseline used to calculate the width of its territorial waters in the Gulf of Tonkin. State-run Vietnam News
THIRD ANNIVERSARY OF WAR: Ursula von der Leyen said that Europe was in Kyiv because ‘it is not only the destiny of Ukraine that is at stake. It’s Europe’s destiny’ A dozen leaders from Europe and Canada yesterday visited Ukraine’s capital to mark the third anniversary of Russia’s invasion in a show of support for Kyiv by some of its most important backers. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau were among the visitors greeted at the railway station by Ukrainian Minister of Foreign Affairs Andrii Sybiha and the president’s chief of staff Andrii Yermak. Von der Leyen wrote on social media that Europe was in Kyiv “because Ukraine is in Europe.” “In this fight for survival, it is not only the destiny of Ukraine that is
RSS