The Migrant Habano
Artist Statement
My research into the world of tobacco began far from the cigar itself. I went back to 1492 and to the Indigenous communities of Cuba, where behiques used cohoba within Taíno ritual life. I was interested in understanding what tobacco meant before it became a commodity and its relationship to the land, ritual, community and a way of understanding the world.
From there, I followed tobacco across centuries of Cuban history until reaching Vuelta Abajo, in western Cuba, a region whose vegas became internationally renowned for the quality of their tobacco. The landscape became central to the research. Soil, climate, cultivation and accumulated knowledge made tobacco inseparable from a particular territory and from the people who worked it.
But that relationship between people and territory was eventually fractured. Following the Cuban Revolution, tobacco growers and families connected to the industry left the island and carried their knowledge elsewhere. My research followed some of those migrations to Nicaragua, the Dominican Republic, Miami and Tampa, where Cuban tobacco traditions encountered new soils and were reconstructed beyond Cuba. The journey of tobacco gradually became, for me, a story about migration.
The works developed through Art & Habanos: Smoke & Brushstrokes incorporate materials connected to Vuelta Abajo and to the material culture of the cigar itself, such as soil, tobacco leaves, recovered vintage cigar bands and wood from emptied cigar boxes. I combine these elements with acrylic on canvas and resin, allowing fragments of territory, labor and memory to become physically embedded in the work.
Resin became particularly important during this process. Rather than simply protecting the surface, it encapsulates the materials. Leaves, soil, paper and fragments of wood are suspended and preserved, almost as if undergoing a contemporary process of fossilization. Matter becomes both material and document.
The Migrant Habano ultimately follows more than the geographical journey of Cuban tobacco. It asks what happens when knowledge rooted in one territory is forced to move, and what people carry with them when they rebuild a tradition somewhere else. The cigar becomes a witness to that displacement, an object capable of carrying traces of land, history, labor and migration.
This research ended in the book "Art & Habanos. Smoke & Brushstrokes", presented at InterTabac in Dortmund, Germany, in September 2025.
