THE CURATED LIFE
“A CIGAR is a sort of a thing, not exactly a pleasure, but the crown and outward sign of pleasure,” wrote the Russian author Leo Tolstoy in Anna Karenina. Of course, a cigar has never been just an instrument of pleasure; it’s also a cultural object, revered since its earliest days, when the Taíno people—the original inhabitants of Cuba—cultivated tobacco for religious purposes. They consumed it in such immense quantities that their shaman entered a trance, in which state he would receive whatever divine wisdom could make itself clear through the fug of tobacco smoke.