Also in sharp contrast to our country's increasingly smoke-unfriendly urban centers is a prevalence of cigar smoking just about anywhere you would care to venture, both indoors and out. It makes sense; just as one wouldn't expect to go to Paris without finding Bordeaux flowing freely at meals, cigars are the Cubans' cultural and economic lifeblood. La Floridita, the legendary Hemingway hangout in Old Havana, proved an ideal snapshot of laid-back Cuban nightlife: a local singer performed Latin jazz and samba while the distinguished-looking white-haired gentleman behind the bar poured me a daiquiri - the real one favored by Hemingway, not the sweet, alcoholic Slush Puppie it's evolved into in much of America. All the while, aromatic cigar smoke curled around the room, as if framing a scene from a faraway time; if you squinted you could almost see Papa's ghost in the smoke, sitting in his private barstool, the one long ago famously roped off by the bar's owners.

Preserving the past is very much a part of Cubans' lives, but the country's cigarmakers seem to have accepted that too slavish a devotion to tradition can lead to stagnation, and in a marketplace as competitive as today's, that could lead to obsolescence. I still had to answer the question of what the Cubans are doing to silence the doubts about quantity over quality that had arisen during the boom. After attending a seminar hosted by Habanos's quality division and the country's Institute for Research Studies on Tobacco, I am convinced that the industry is in capable hands.

Eumelio Espinoso Marrero, director of the Institute, began by ticking off the various natural enemies of the tobacco plant, a rogues gallery as numerous and bizarre as Dick Tracy's. There's orobanche ramosa, or "branched broomrape," a parasite native to the soil of the central region that drains plants of chlorophyll and renders them incapable of photosynthesis. The result can be a 50 percent drop in crop yield. There's the tobacco mosaic virus, transmitted not naturally but mechanically by field workers, which can stunt the growth of leaves at a cellular level. There's weather fleck, which renders wrapper leaf stained and spotty from high concentrations of ozone in the lower atmosphere. There are fungi and insects and, of course, universal enemy no. 1, spoken of with the same gravity as al Qaeda at a White House war room briefing: the dreaded blue mold.

"Blue mold appeared in Cuba for the first time in 1957," Marrero pointed out, "but since the strain was not then adaptable to our environmental conditions, it disappeared by itself the following year, and it was not seen again until February of 1979. From 1979 to 1980, it resulted in a loss of almost 95 percent of the national tobacco production."

Marrero went on to describe how organic interbreeding and genetic selection have been successful in developing leaf varieties that are more resistant to this scourge and others; as always, the challenge for farmers has been preserving the quality of the world's most vaunted tobacco in the process. "Sometimes this work is ungrateful," he said with a hint of resignation. "After eight years of developing a new variety, you can subject it to the field, and find that it does not meet the standards of the market. To give you an idea, our first program for the improvement of the species had 24,000 possible varieties. However, only two actually achieved the status of commercial varieties." This sobering fact was my first indication that Habanos was serious about superior standards, and the facts cited by Marrero's colleague, Luis Felipe Milanes, drove the point home. Some have been well-publicized, at least among industry insiders: the older factories being refurbished and set up for better efficiency, the Cubans' recent adoption of the draw-testing machine. Others are less well-known.

"Quality control technicians ensure the proper size, length, and weight of all cigars. They take apart some samples to ensure everything was put together properly. Cigars are packaged together based on uniformity of color. After packaging, each box is inspected for its presentation, and given a special certificate. There are records kept by the technicians in charge so we can detect any problems in the process. Overall, the Institute guarantees compliance with over 9,000 standards." Milanes wrapped up by naming the formula for Habanos's success: "It is a combination of wisdom, sunshine, and soil. There is no haste, no abandonment of tradition - but an increase in human ability."

The statement called to mind Garcia's bold pronouncement of the previous day, when I posited that the spread of Cuban seed, as well as the gradual exodus of skilled Cuban-born rollers to other nations, may have leveled the playing field somewhat. "A lot of Cuban growers have left the country with Cuban seed," he said, "and they have grown tobacco in other countries. It is not bad quality, but it will never be the same as the tobacco grown in Pinar del Rio. It is not the same soil."