What is a Cigar?

CIGAR
A cigar is a tobacco leaf wrapped around a tobacco leaf filling. Bigger than a cigarette, and taking longer to smoke, the cigar is considered by aficionados to be the finest way to enjoy tobacco.

Cigars come in several shapes and sizes. The standard shape is the round-headed cigar with parallel sides. Perfecto refers to a cigar with a pointed head and tapering sides; Panatella is a long, thin, straight cigar; Cheroot is an open-ended cigar, usually made in India or Asia. A special vocabulary denotes cigar sizes. From the smallest [3.5 in (8.9 cm)] to the largest [7.5 in (19 cm)] they are the Half Corona, Tres Petit Corona, Petit Corona Corona, Corona Grande, Lonsdale, and Double Corona. A set of initials usually stamped on the bottom or side of a box of cigars refers to the color of the tobacco leaf: C C C is Claro (light); C C means Colorado-Claro (medium); C means Colorado (dark); and C M stands for Colorado-Maduro (very dark). The darker leaf is generally the stronger tobacco.
History
The earliest cigars were probably those rolled by native Cubans. Columbus encountered Cubans smoking crude cigars, and subsequent Spanish and Portuguese expeditions to the New World brought back cigars to Europe. Many sailors smoked cigars, and brought the habit to port cities, but the habit did not become widely popular until the end of the eighteenth century. Cigar factories existed in Spain at this time, and in the 1780s factories were established in France and Germany as well. English officers who fought in Spain during the Napoleonic Wars brought cigars home to England, where they became a fad with the upper classes. Cigars were expensive, especially because of high import duties on them, and by the end of the nineteenth century, they had become a mark of luxury. Smoking cigars was for men only (even smoking in sight of a woman was considered vulgar), and special smoking clubs called divans sprang up where men could enjoy their habit.
In the twentieth century, cigars were associated with notable public figures, from presidents to gangsters to entertainers. Winston Churchill, Calvin Coolidge, Al Capone, and Groucho Marx, to name a few, were all avid cigar smokers. After World War II, the cigar increasingly became the old man's smoke. Instead of being considered suave, the cigar became something conspicuously inelegant. This perception of the cigar has reversed recently, as cigar smoking became newly fashionable in the 1990s. Special cigar clubs and cigar "smoke out" dinners in cities across the United States in the 1990s put forth a revamped image of the cigar as a luxurious vice for men and also women to enjoy. By the mid-1990s, there were an estimated eight million cigar smokers in the United States, and cigar manufacturers were hard pressed to meet booming demand.
Though the finest cigars still come from Cuba, cigars are manufactured all across the globe. As early as 1610, cigar tobacco was grown in Massachusetts, and other early centers of tobacco cultivation were the Philippines, Java, Ceylon (Sri Lanka), and Russia. American cigar tobacco was mostly exported to the West Indies, rolled there, and then imported as finished cigars, until the beginning of the nineteenth century. A domestic cigar industry developed after 1801, and by 1870 there were cigar factories all across the country. Tampa, Florida, was a center for cigar manufacturing, though Pennsylvania, Connecticut, and New York also had hundreds of cigar factories.
Cigars were made by hand until the beginning of the twentieth century. The industry mechanized rapidly between 1910 and 1929. The number of cigar factories in the United States fell dramatically—from almost 23,000 in 1910 to only around 6,000 in 1929—but the mechanized factories produced many more cigars than the old handwork ones. Today, the finest cigars are still made entirely by hand. But the majority is made either entirely or partially by machine.