Published in Islands, October 1992

Eleanor Walsh is an artist. Her unlikely medium is the cigar. “Make no mistake about it, hand-rolled cigars are an art form,” says Walsh, the only woman to own and operate a Key West cigar factory.

To connoisseurs, the nuances of the cigar are as subtle as fine wine or a watercolor painting. Tobacco leaves, as varied as grapes, must be as carefully selected; the blends must complement each other to create a mellow taste. Leaf must be rolled as lightly as delicate brush strokes for smoke to filter through effortlessly. Once rolled, leaves must be pressed with the accuracy of an artisan who makes his own paper, and the final wrapper, frequently a fine Connecticut or African tobacco leaf must be applied with the deft touch of a goldsmith.

“The Cuban and Bahamian workers who came out of retirement to help me didn’t understand how refined their skills were,” Walsh observes. “I absorbed everything I could from them.”

When Walsh’s husband was killed in an accident in 1963, she was a mother of two who had worked only briefly as a model. After her husband’s death, she moved to Key West to “bury my head in the sand.” A friend who was involved I the construction of a shopping mall got Walsh interested in Key West’s commercial history, and to her own surprise she soon found herself carrying a part of it forward.

Key West’s transition in the 1800s from a fishing town to the most prosperous U.S. cigar center once made it Florida’s fastest growing city. Cuban émigrés seeking shelter from political strife prior to the Spanish-American War helped develop the industry on U.S. soil. They had farmed tobacco and rolled cigars for Havana’s thriving cigar business.

At its industrial peak in 1880, the 8-square-mile island was studded with 57 cigar factories that employed 3000 workers and produced a staggering 62 million cigars annually. But eventually, the industry fell victim to politics, union strikes, hurricanes and fires. By the time Walsh puffed her first hand-rolled piece of art in 1965 -- her “El Hemingway” cigar -- there were only six small factories still supplying cigars for local consumption. Ten years later, Walsh’s Key West Cigar Factory was the sole survivor of a glittering, artistic era.

In 1985, a 94-year old Cuban leaf stripper named Carmen retired from the Key West Cigar Factory, and Walsh, using the cigar industry’s Spanish name tradition, named her popular cigarillo after the woman. It took eight months to perfect the long, thin hand-rolled “Carmen” cigarillo. Since 1985, Eleanor has trained young cigar makers herself.

Good cigar rollers are hard to find these days. Salaries for skilled workers are high, but lifestyles and benefits have changed dramatically since the 1800’s when cigar workers would listen for hours to classical stories read to them in Spanish and English by a “lector”; when housing was provided to a worker’s family in the “cigar town” that surrounded each factory. It was a time when Key West and Havana cigars were status symbols, and cigar makers attended to minuscule details that guaranteed quality.

“Of course, I made mistakes at first,” says Walsh. “I’d buy too much tobacco and it would sit around collecting dust. Men don’t mind dust, but I hate dust. Or I’d put cigars on the gift store shelf, and because they had no chemicals to keep them pliable like machine processed cigars have, they’d dry out and I would have to throw them away.”

Today Walsh buys South American leaves grown from the seeds of clear Havana tobacco that was smuggled from Cuba when Castro took over. Honduran. Brazilian. Colombian. But high quality African and American tobaccos are mainstays, too. And she flash freezes her 25 name brand cigars after they’ve been boxed, then wrapped in plastic.

Even buying a freezer requires a certain expertise. “I have to buy old freezers,” says Walsh, “because I don’t want a self-cleaning one that will remove moisture from my cigars. After all, moisture – humidity -- was the common denominator for successful cigar towns like Key West and Havana. It’s still one of the ingredients of fine cigar making.”
Nostalgia must be another one. Walking into Walsh’s factory is like walking through a 19th century time warp. Hundreds of antique cigar molds hang along the wall, archaic wooden cigar boxes line rich mahogany shelves, valuable cigar box-top labels glow beneath glass-top counters. There’s even a carved wooden Indian.
Every day a cigar maker demonstrates her art during factory hours at an old rolling desk, and pungent blends of tobacco waft through the small shop.

“I wish I could have bought out the other six factories when I first started here,” says Walsh as she sniffs a panatela. “They were beautiful -- the rows of desks, readers chairs, the spectacular aroma. All those museum-quality things just disappeared when the old factory owners died and their shops went out of business. Now you rarely find the tools of the trade in attics or even antique shops.”

But you do find such antique tools of the trade in use at Walsh’s factory. Only one man on the island still knows how to repair the classic “star” and “half moon” cutters her workers use to clip cigar ends after pressing. And one of the cigar makers prefers to spread his leaves on the hardwood of Walsh’s well-worn rolling board -- the one with “Miller, Dubrul & Peters Manufacturing, 1880” carved in the side. And, of course, the antique cigar molds are peeled from the wall to press cigars as needed.

However, the magnificent cigar label artwork of yesteryear is merely a memory – or a collector’s item. “In the late 19th and early 20th centuries,” according to L. Glenn Westfall’s book, Key West: Cigar City U.S.A., “cigars were the most popular tobacco product, just as cigarettes later dominated the tobacco market after 1930. No expense was considered too great in order to create an appealing advertisement label. Manufacturers spent up to $5,000 for a decorative and colorful cigar label which would hopefully appeal to the buying public.”

But today, the cost for wood and cardboard-blend boxes alone prohibits the expense of elaborate artwork and printing of multicolored labels.

Walsh collects these memorabilia from the heyday of cigars. One of her favorites, an 1886 framed label showing the Eduardo H. Gato factory, hangs in her office. She eyes it as she muses on the future: “So far I’ve focused on the finest quality cigars. Now it’s time for packaging.”

By Barbara Bowers, © 1991