COHIBA

The cigar that caught Castro’s attention

In a 1994 interview with Marvin R. Shanken, Fidel Castro recalled noticing the aroma of a cigar smoked by one of his bodyguards. When he asked about it, he learned that a friend made the cigars. Castro tried one, liked it and wanted to find the maker. A private blend had found a powerful admirer.

Castro described asking how the cigars were made, which leaves went into them and where the tobacco came from. A production operation followed. That small exchange—one smoker asking another what he was enjoying—would become the opening scene in an unusually consequential cigar story.

The hands behind the name

The roller was Eduardo Rivera Irizarri. In his own account to journalist James Suckling, Rivera explained that he had been working at La Corona and making cigars to a personal blend. He initially supplied Castro from his home and, for a time, from the factory.

Celia Sánchez, a close associate of Castro, helped shape the project. Habanos credits her with suggesting the name Cohiba in 1966, drawing on a Taíno word for a roll of tobacco leaves. A new Cuban brand was taking a name from the island’s much older tobacco culture.

Rivera recalled that El Laguito in Havana began as a school for women learning to roll cigars, with roughly twenty rollers in the early group.

A diplomatic gift steps into society

For years, Cohibas were reserved for Castro and gifts to Cuban and foreign government figures. Their reputation traveled before ordinary customers could buy them. A box arriving through diplomatic channels carried a story along with its contents: access to something most people had only heard about.

That changed in 1982. Habanos records the brand’s public presentation at Madrid’s Ritz Hotel, an appropriately grand setting for a cigar already surrounded by curiosity. Cohiba entered international commercial markets with a reputation that had been developing for years.

The creator in the hotel shop

In 1995, Suckling visited Havana’s Comodoro hotel cigar shop and found Rivera rolling in a corner. He had left El Laguito in 1970 and returned to farming. Now he was filling in for a friend who had gone to Hong Kong. The brand had become famous; its original blender was back at the table, doing a favor.

A family of different characters

The range expanded well beyond those early cigars. Línea 1492 arrived in 1992; Maduro 5 followed in 2007. The latter’s numeral refers to its wrapper tobacco being aged for five years. Habanos classifies the Clásica and Maduro 5 lines as medium to full in strength, the 1492 line as medium, and Behike as full.

The Behike line launched in 2010 with BHK 52, 54 and 56. Its blend incorporated medio tiempo, rich upper leaves that only some sun-grown tobacco plants produce. Habanos linked their natural scarcity to the line’s restricted production. Even at this end of the luxury business, the field gets a say.

Champions with a favorite in the humidor

Michael Jordan has never been shy about his interest in cigars. In his 2005 conversation with Shanken, he identified a Cohiba Siglo II among the cigars he had smoked. His preferences extend across several brands, but the Cohiba connection is there in his own words.

Stephen Curry supplied a more personal discovery story. In a 2024 Cigar Aficionado profile, he recalled a friend giving him a box of Cohiba Behike BHK 56 cigars for his thirty-fifth birthday. He said they immediately became his favorite. It is a familiar way to find a cigar you love: somebody who knows your tastes puts the right box in your hands.

Hollywood afternoons, Cuban rhythm

Josh Brolin chose a Cohiba Siglo VI during a 2024 interview at his Malibu home. The actor, whose films include No Country for Old Men and Dune, was sitting poolside and talking through a life that ranges from acting to art and motorcycles. The cigar belonged to an afternoon conversation, an ordinary pleasure in an extraordinary career.

Cuban musician Cimafunk has also spoken of liking the Cohiba Robusto. His ultimate favorite, he told the magazine in 2022, was a cigar rolled by his father. That detail brings the story pleasingly close to where Cohiba began: someone making a cigar for the simple satisfaction of sharing it.

Where the leaf comes from

Cuban Cohiba’s agricultural roots lie in Vuelta Abajo, in Pinar del Río. Habanos identifies selected tobacco from the growing districts of San Juan y Martínez and San Luis. These are places containing many farms, or vegas. The wrapper, binder and filler in the Cuban cigar are Cuban leaf, assembled by hand.

There is also an extra stage behind the finished cigar. Habanos describes a third fermentation in barrels for Cohiba’s seco and ligero filler leaves, a treatment it associates with greater smoothness. That is a specific process for particular filler leaves. The care happens well before the roller reaches for a wrapper or applies the familiar band.

The Cohiba beyond Cuba

The separate Cohiba portfolio marketed in the United States follows a broader tobacco map. Cohiba Red Dot is handmade in the Dominican Republic, combining a Cameroon wrapper, Indonesian Jember binder and Dominican Piloto Cubano filler. The last name describes a tobacco variety; the leaf is grown in the Dominican Republic.

Cohiba Riviera, made in Nicaragua, uses a Mexican San Andrés wrapper over a Honduran Connecticut binder and fillers from Honduras and Nicaragua. Its leaf comes from a different set of growing regions than the Cuban brand, as the maker’s blend description makes clear.

There is a South Florida chapter, too. Cohiba Serie M is made with El Titan de Bronze on Calle Ocho in Miami’s Little Havana. The collaboration gives the non-Cuban portfolio a connection to the small workshops that remain part of the city’s cigar-making culture.