There’s a moment of stunned silence before more than 1,000 voices are lifted in a collective cheer. As the whooping and clapping dies down, the air buzzes with questions. “Can you believe it?”, “Who was the buyer?”, and even, “What does that work out as per cigar?” Through a haze of swirling, aromatic smoke, I see the faces of fellow partygoers illuminated as they puff on their puros – many showing a mixture of astonishment, wonder, and bemusement, while others shrug as if genuinely unsurprised.
It’s the final night of the twenty third Festival del Habano – the Cuban cigar world’s equivalent of Fèis Ìle and the Spirit of Speyside rolled into one – and, after hours of eating, drinking, smoking, and non-stop entertainment, including raucous dancing troupes and opera singers, a bespoke humidor of 500 Cohiba cigars has just sold for €4.2 million, or roughly £3.6 million, after a bidding war between two collectors. A spectator on a nearby table points out that the sale has broken the previous record of €2.4 million (£2.05 million), set in 2020 at the same event for a similar bespoke cabinet of cigars. In total, €11 million (£9.3 million) has been raised for Cuba’s healthcare system through the sale of just six lots at the charity auction, which, as is now tradition, capped off the week’s itinerary of factory tours, tastings, and cigar-related revelry.
For non-cigar-smoking readers, it may seem astounding that an auction – even one raising money for charity, when high bids are expected – could raise such a sum with so few lots, especially considering the order of magnitude by which the hammer prices outstripped similar high-end sales in the whisky world, where the closest comparable charity auction raised a total of £3.1 million across 42 lots. It’s more astounding when one considers that Habanos S.A., the 50 per cent state-owned company responsible for all of Cuba’s cigar distribution, reported sales of US$545 million (£465.5 million) in 2022, roughly half that achieved by Macallan-maker Edrington alone in the year ending March 2023. So, by any scale of comparison, the world of luxury, hand-rolled Havana cigars remains pretty niche, even compared with single malt Scotch whisky, which itself is
