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Christmas Smoke

Posted on December 20, 2011 By Joseph

For me Christmas will always be associated with a pungent cloud of white smoke rising from the glowing end of a long, fat handmade Cuban cigar. Actually, I would be more accurate if I said, "a long, fat cigar handmade by a Cuban."

My grandfather, Carlos Lazo de Lazo, was the undisputed patriarch of my family.  He was a Cuban man’s man.  Silent and strong, boisterous and sentimental, rough and narcissistic, gentle and generous.  He was a paradox, as Cuban men tend to be, a combination of many elements and not all of them pleasant.

His immediate family consisted of a doting wife 17 years his junior and four daughters.  One, Lolita, died at the age of 21 of Bright’s disease.  He had no sons.

He had me.  I was the first boy born into the family and my grandfather’s favorite grandchild.  Machungo, he would call me.  A term that lovingly translates as “Little Macho Man.”  In this age of male chauvinism and feminism, I’m not embarrassed by the term.  Being my grandfather’s favorite has stood me in good stead for most of my life. My grandparents taught me about love, my grandfather taught me how to appreciate the finer things in life, and that dark, oily, fat cigarro was an essential part of the lesson.

If he were here, this is how he might have told me his story . . .

“Before leaving Cuba during the Spanish American War my family owned and farmed a tobacco plantation in the western Cuban province of Pinar del Rio.  Besides growing el mas fino tobacco in Cuba, we ran a casino on the side.  It was a casino in the historic sense — ‘a gathering place for social amusements.’  There was no gambling (well, maybe an occasional bet on a game of dominos or a cockfight), but plenty of vino, musica, dance and cigar smoke.

“I started smoking cigars when I was seven years old and in 1903, when I was 25 years old, I brought the habit and art of cigars with me to the Ybor City quarter of Tampa, Florida.  At the Hav-a-Tampa Cigar Company, I refined my talent as a blender of tobaccos to such an extent that when the millionaire Summerfield wanted to start a cigar factory in Miami, he hired me.  I brought my family to Miami and so, chico, cigars are responsible for your parents meeting and you and your sisters and brother being born.

“In 1940, I built a concrete block building behind my home on Ninth Street.  We called it el chinchal, which means “a mom and pop business,” but which, to Cubans in Tampa, Miami and Key West, can only mean a small cigar factory.  In tribute to the company who gave me my first job in America, I named my company - “Have-a-Miami.” Together with your father and my oldest daughter, Blanquita, I peddled my combustibles to the Cuban tiendas and restaurantes in Miami.  Until 1957, 1 employed between 12 to 25 cigar makers who hand-rolled about 100 cigars a day each.  My family, including my wife, Maria, my daughters and your sisters, put bands and wrappers on the cigars and pressed them into the boxes, being very careful not to break them.

“Todo mi vida I smoked 20 to 25 cigars a day, starting each morning with un cabo, a half-smoked cigar saved from the night before, waiting at my bedside.  I died in 1963, at the age of 85, enfermo, si, chico, pero more sick of living without my Maria, than sick.”

Gracias for your story, Abuelito….

The image of my grandfather sitting in a rocking chair on his porch with a cigar burning between his fingers is indelibly burnt into my memory.  The porch is unscreened, of concrete construction with a low wall and pillars.  The furniture consists of my grandparents’ rocking chairs and a group of straw-backed chairs that we pulled up next to theirs.  My cousins and I would watch the ash on his cigar growing ever longer and wager whether it would tumble down the front of his shirt before he flicked it off.  I learned that if I bet on my grandfather, I always won.

The best Christmases of my life took place in or around my grandparents’ house.  The annual Christmas show, directed by my older sister and starring “the cousins,” was held in my grandmother’s living room.  The opening of family gifts took place around the fifteen-foot Christmas tree next door in my aunt’s boarding house.  The traditional nochebuena feast was served in el chinchal.  Most of the courses — the salad, yuca, black beans, rice, platanos (fried bananas) — were prepared in my grandmother’s kitchen.  But the main course, the roast pig, was my grandfather’s sole domain.

He sat in front of a pit dug three-feet deep in the back yard.  The pit was filled with 20 pounds of glowing charcoals.  Across the pit a flat grill constructed of wire mesh and made to swing slowly rocked to and fro.  Upon the grill a 50-pound pig marinated overnight in lemon and orange juices and pocked with garlic cloves lay spread eagle, the fat oozing out until it dripped onto the coals with mini-explosions.  The weather was invariably warm so that you couldn’t tell if the hot on your face came from the coals or the blazing sun.  In my grandfather’s left hand was a glass of red wine, in his right the ever-present cigar.

Every now and then, with timing tuned to some infallible inner clock, he nudged the swing in order to keep the pig gently rocking to and fro.  Every now and then, he let me rock it.  I was tentative, nervous.  But after a few tries — this time too hard, that time too gently — I got in rhythm.

My grandfather spoke little English, and although I understood Spanish, I spoke not a word.  So we did not speak.  We sat, watched the pig and rocked the swing surrounded by the warmth of the fire and a cloud of cigar smoke.  I felt special, I felt like a machungo.

So this Christmas, wherever I am and in spite of the United States boycott against Cuban cigars, I will toast my grandfather with a glass of vino tinto and light up un Cubano.
 
May all our Christmases be merry, but if not merry, at least as pleasurable as the times I spent breathing in my grandfather’s smoke and watching the Christmas pig roasting on an open fire.

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