THE ORIGIN OF TOBACCO

The origin of tobacco goes back to the Andes region, between Peru and Ecuador and the first crops are considered to take place between five and three thousand years (BC). At the time America was colonized, its consumption was already spread throughout the continent. Besides being smoked, the tobacco was aspired by the nose, chewed, eaten, drunk, smeared on the body, used in eye drops and enemas. It was used in rituals such as blowing at the faces of warriors before the battle, it was spread on fields before planting, offered to the gods and poured over the women before sexual relationship.

Versions taken from Spanish writers propose that "tobacco" comes from the Castilianization of where the plant was discovered, either Tobago, a Caribbean island or the Mexican city of Tabasco. However, the most likely thing is that comes from the Arabic "tabbaq", name applied in Europe since at least XV century to various medicinal plants.

The first encounter of which there are news, between the Old World and the tobacco, took place in 1492 at the friendly ceremony that Christopher Columbus received from the hands of Guanahani's natives, one of the islands that conform the Bahamas' archipelago.

Three days after that ceremony with which the New World welcomed its discoverer, The Admiral recognized among the belongings that an Indian was carrying in his canoe the same dry leaves that he had seen before while sailing between the islands of Santa Marthe de la Concepcion and Fernandina, as he baptized them, in the Bahamas.

But it was not until November of that year that the Spaniards noticed the importance and the value that those "dry leaves" had. Some days after the landing at Bariay, on the northeastern coast of Cuba, about 30 miles southwest of Gibara, in the current city of Holguin, the Spanish Rodrigo de Xerez and Luis de Torres, along with two Indians sent to explore the newly discovered lands, were the first Europeans who discovered the tobacco and the use of it by the Taino Indians. On this regard, it is read in the Journal of Columbus, with notes of Fray Bartolomé de las Casas, that both women and men passed through their villages with herbs in their hands to make incense. Those herbs were stuck in another leaf by way of musket, which was light on one side and sucked in the other, sipping inwards the smoke that lulled the meat and provoked to be drunk. Fray Bartolomé also said "those muskets, or whatever we call them, they call them tobacco’’. In this way, it has been established that the tobacco is native of America and its first use was known in Cuba.

By order of Philip II, Boncalo Hernandez, chronicler and historian of the Indies, was who took the first seeds of tobacco that arrived in Europe in 1559.

In Europe, the tobacco acquired the huge boom due mainly to be considered a relaxing and enjoyable habit. Soon his fame was spreading due to the therapeutic use that was made out of it reaching the point of being seen as a home remedy until the seventeenth century when it was begun to doubt about such properties. The struggle to remove it from the medicine was a success but not so, the one that tried to outlaw the habit.

For centuries the tobacco, that very Cuban product, has continued to captivate the world with its unique aroma and flavor.