I told srtriplett02 I was going to relay this story to him, but thought I'd post it here for anyone else who wanted to read it. Here's the story Stuart.About four years ago, while I was living in Sacramento, I found this cigar store on 16th Avenue called Casilla’s. I’d stop in about once a week or so to restock. Over time, I got to know the old Cuban guy who runs the shop. Can’t remember his name, but he was a neat old man... he told me about how he didn't go to school past the age of 13 because he had to work to help support the family. He said he started smoking cigars when he was 12 and has had one in his mouth ever since. He is now missing part of his lower lip because of it. A real poster child for the anti-smoking lobby. He started out sweeping the floor in a cigar factory then after a few years, began rolling. Well, after many years of working in the factory, Castro came into power and his father told him to get out of Cuba. He took his family, packed up and emigrated to the US. He set up shop doing the only thing he knew, making cigars. His whole family, son, daughter and I think his sister all worked for him.
By the time I started frequenting his shop, he had to be in his seventies. Old, dark skinned; his hands and fingernails permanently stained from the tobacco leaves. Very strong hands too… When he would shake my hand his paws would wrap around mine with a death grip. His store was an old butcher shop and the “humidor” was the walk-in freezer. The refrigeration unit was no longer used and instead there was a humidifier in the room. I’d go into the humidor and grab a few of these and some of those and the old man would be right behind me telling me (in a thick Cuban accent) “No, no. Ju don’ wan dos. Eer, I get ju de good ones.” He’d pick out some that had sat a little longer in the humidor and put them in a bag for me. I was going in there so often and talking with this guy, that finally one day I asked him how difficult it was to roll a cigar. He grabbed me by the shoulder and pulled me to one of the workstations. He had me sit down then gave me the beginning of a cigar and a stack of tobacco and had me finish rolling it. The whole time I was working on it he was laughing and telling me, in Spanish, what to do. I didn’t understand a damn thing he was saying but I got the idea I wasn’t doing it very well. Then he cut the wrapper for me, laid it down on the table and had me roll the cigar diagonally along the wrapper all the way to the glued edge. He cut a cap, dabbed some glue on the piece and slapped it on the top. After I finished rolling it, and was looking over my pathetic, twisted piece of work, I asked, “What do I do with it know?”
He laughed again and loudly said, “Ju take it out of my store!”
So I did just that. As I went to the counter to pay for the bag of cigars, he slipped over to his workstation. I could see he had opened a relatively small humidor, it held maybe 50 or 75 cigars, and he grabbed a couple of sticks and then came back to the front counter. Before I could get to the door, he met me there and put the cigars from his own stash in my shirt pocket and said, “Eer, dees are for ju. Ju don pay for dees. Dis is my gift to ju.” This was the beginning of a ritual that happened about every other time I went in there. Don’t know if it was because of the price, or perhaps he had “different” tobacco for his own cigars or just because of his gratefulness, but I have to say those cigars from his own humidor were the best smokes I’ve ever had.
