Artefact of the Week: "Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar"

Taken from Cubaheadlines.com

Ídolo del Tabaco, Museo Antropológico Montané, Havana.

Last week I talked about an interesting pipe from the historic town of Port Royal, Jamaica. There I argued that pipes were a far more interesting smoking “artefact” than cigarettes or cigars. I forgot to mention, however, that the cigar holds a much more important place in the history of the Caribbean than the pipe. Therefore for this week’s  artefact of the week I 'll talk a bit about the biggest cigar of them all.

Of course, economically speaking the cigar was and arguably still is the most important export product of the Greater Antilles. However, its cultural value should not be underestimated, either, especially in the case of Cuba. The U.S.A. still has an embargo on Cuban cigars, which has a cultural as much as an economic motivation — their loss, I would say. Before the Cuban revolution the famous Cuban anthropologists Fernando Ortíz discussed the nation’s colonial history and cultural spirit using its two biggest export products: cigars and sugar. Where sugar is grown in huge number and produced through the large-scale processing of hundreds and hundreds of tons of sugar cane — a process that, before mechanization, relied solely on slave labour —, cigar tobacco stands for the free-spirited and careful process of  planting, selecting, picking and hand rolling of quality brand cigars by various specialists. The production of sugar and cigars shows, according to Ortíz, the three cultural forces at work in Cuba: a combination of Western and African culture in the form of mass-production and the import of humans and crops from Africa and entrepreneurship combined with an indigenous, Pre-Colonial “tobacco ideology,”  respectively.

This artefact of the week, aptly named the Ídolo del Tabaco, is perhaps the most famous example of this Pre-Colonial Cuban “tobacco ideology.” It is not difficult to see that it resembles a big cigar with a face on it. Many believe that the fact that this idol is shaped like a giant cigar is not coincidental. While in other parts of the America’s pipes were also used to smoke tobacco with, in the Greater Antilles we only know of tobacco consumption in the form of cigars or by burning it like incense. The few ethnohistorical sources do not mention any particular god or spirit that was connected with the consumption of tobacco, but many think that this idol is a representation of some cigar god, hence its name.

Still, if it was directly involved with the intake of tobacco the fact that the Ídolo de Tabaco has a flat top would actually seem suggestive of burning tobacco like incense rather than smoking it as a cigar. The problem with this interpretation is that platters on the head of an idol like this one are best known for their use as “snorting tables” for the ingestion of another Pre-Columbian drug, commonly known as cohoba. This cohoba contained a mixture of the crushed seeds of the Anadenanthera peregrina, a tree that is still quit common in the Caribbean today, and the chalk from crushed shells. By snorting this drug up through the nose and together with fasting and a lot of vomiting this could induce powerful hallucinations.

These drug-induced hallucinations were thought to be the domain of the shaman, who was called behique among the indigenous people of the Greater Antilles. This person, perhaps in combination with the chief, was the spiritual advisor of his community — I am not being chauvinistic here, but there is, as of yet, no evidence for female behiques. Using trance and hallucination he would communicate with other than human beings and use that to, for example, tell the future or communicate with the dead. Cohoba was not the only drug used for this. As many who smoked a good strong Cubano can vouch for, tobacco can be another very effective means of entering these trance-like states and we know that this was another drug the Antillean behiques used regularly.

So, although we see a big cigar with a face when we look at this idol,  a cohoba-snorting, tobacco smoking behique probably saw a spirit in material form. Perhaps it was even an actual cigar-spirit that could be communicated with when in trance, which is the case among some contemporary societies of the Guyanas. It is not unlikely to think that idols like this one were perceived to be influential friends and helpers of the behique, who was a respected and feared member of his community for just that reason. Nowadays smoking a cigar with friends in high places is often a good way to climb the social ladder, the Ídolo del Tabaco, avatar of all Cuban cigars, shows that this was not much different in the past.

Tobacco and networking, they tell me it is a winning combination…