Corojo tobacco takes its name from the Santa Ines del Corojo Vega, a plantation near the town of San Luis y Martinez in Pinar del Rio in the heart of Cuba’s famed Vuelta Abajo tobacco-growing region. Diego Rodriguez began renting the farm from its owner in Spain in the 1920’s, and worked for years to select and develop a superior wrapper tobacco for Cuban cigars.

Between 1930 and the late 1990’s, all cigars from Cuba — regardless of brand or factory — used Rodriguez’s Vuelta Abajo grown Corojo tobacco leaves for their wrappers. The spicy quality and peppery smoothness gave the leaf that unique Cuban “punch” that connoisseurs came to associate with authentic Cuban cigars.

The only problem is that true Corojo tobacco is also delicate and hard to grow. It requires just the right soil, rainfall and weather conditions. It is extremely susceptible to blue mold and black shank disease.

Cuba stopped growing it for that reason.

Yes, you heard that correctly.

Cuba stopped growing the wrapper tobacco that had helped make Cuban cigars famed world-wide because it was too hard to grow on their government-run farms after the Revolution.

The 1996-97 Corojo harvest in Cuba was the last.

Tobacco production on the Corojo Vega was down and each year was a gamble. Would enough suitable leaf survive disease and weather conditions to supply wrapper for Cuba’s export quota of cigars? Castro did not like gambling with a prime source of income. The Cuban government needed to replace the delicate Corojo with something more durable and more dependable.

Enter the Habana 2000. Authentic Corojo tobacco was cross-bred with a Cuban cigarette tobacco called Bell 61-10. Crossing in cigarette tobacco made it more disease resistant and hardier. It also made it more difficult to ferment and, according to many, caused the hybrid wrapper to have burn problems.

And then there is the issue of flavor…

Back to the drawing board.

Criollo ’98 and Corojo ’99 were supposed to have been improvements of the Habana 2000 strain. Others have described them as completely new attempts at developing a replacement Cuban wrapper by crossing Corojo with Connecticut Shade. Whatever the truth of the matter, it is these hybrids which are mainly used now not only in Cuban cigars but worldwide.

No Cuban cigars have wrappers of the original Corojo tobacco strain today.

No original strain of pure Corojo tobacco is grown today in Cuba.

Many cigar aficionados say that the last really good Cuban cigars were made about a decade ago, with the last crop of authentic Cuban Corojo grown in the Vuelta Abajo.

There has been much success in growing the original Cuban strain of Corojo in the Jamastran Valley, in Honduras, which has soil and climate conditions remarkably similar to those of Cuba’s Vuelta Abajo. There is rich soil there that loves to give strong, full-bodied tobacco. Corojo also needs the sun. It loves it.

The Honduran growing conditions seem to agree with Corojo, although it is still a delicate crop and is still susceptible to disease.

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