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."
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) launched a week-long diplomatic blitz of South America on Thursday by inaugurating a massive deep-water port in Peru, a US$1.3 billion investment by Beijing as it seeks to expand trade and influence on the continent. With China’s demand for agricultural goods and metals from Latin America growing, Xi will participate in the APEC summit in Lima then head to the Group of 20 summit in Rio de Janeiro next week, where he will also make a state visit to Brazil. Xi and Peruvian President Dina Boluarte participated on Thursday by video link in the opening
‘HARD-HEADED’: Some people did not evacuate to protect their property or because they were skeptical of the warnings, a disaster agency official said Typhoon Man-yi yesterday slammed into the Philippines’ most populous island, with the national weather service warning of flooding, landslides and huge waves as the storm sweeps across the archipelago nation. Man-yi was still packing maximum sustained winds of 185kph after making its first landfall late on Saturday on lightly populated Catanduanes island. More than 1.2 million people fled their homes ahead of Man-yi as the weather forecaster warned of a “life-threatening” effect from the powerful storm, which follows an unusual streak of violent weather. Man-yi uprooted trees, brought down power lines and smashed flimsy houses to pieces after hitting Catanduanes in the typhoon-prone
HOPEFUL FOR PEACE: Zelenskiy said that the war would ‘end sooner’ with Trump and that Ukraine must do all it can to ensure the fighting ends next year Russia’s state-owned gas company Gazprom early yesterday suspended gas deliveries via Ukraine, Vienna-based utility OMV said, in a development that signals a fast-approaching end of Moscow’s last gas flows to Europe. Russia’s oldest gas-export route to Europe, a pipeline dating back to Soviet days via Ukraine, is set to shut at the end of this year. Ukraine has said it would not extend the transit agreement with Russian state-owned Gazprom to deprive Russia of profits that Kyiv says help to finance the war against it. Moscow’s suspension of gas for Austria, the main receiver of gas via Ukraine, means Russia now only
BELT-TIGHTENING: Chinese investments in Cambodia are projected to drop to US$35 million in 2026 from more than US$420 million in 2021 At a ceremony in August, Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Manet knelt to receive blessings from saffron-robed monks as fireworks and balloons heralded the breaking of ground for a canal he hoped would transform his country’s economic fortunes. Addressing hundreds of people waving the Cambodian flag, Hun Manet said China would contribute 49 percent to the funding of the Funan Techo Canal that would link the Mekong River to the Gulf of Thailand and reduce Cambodia’s shipping reliance on Vietnam. Cambodia’s government estimates the strategic, if contentious, infrastructure project would cost US$1.7 billion, nearly 4 percent of the nation’s annual GDP. However, months later,
RSS