Friday, February 25 2011
Andrew Osborn | The Telegraph
Cuba has launched this year’s glitzy Havana Cigar Festival on a high note, amid news that international sales of the country's famous hand-rolled cigars are rising for the first time since the global recession hit.
Billed as the biggest international event of its kind, the festival, now in its thirteenth year, is a showcase for the Communist island’s best known and most iconic export. It also provides a rare splash of decadence in an otherwise impoverished no-frills society.
Sales of Cuban cigars dropped sharply in 2008 and 2009 as the global financial crisis and a series of smoking bans around the world began to bite, sapping demand for a product once conspicuously consumed by Left-wing revolutionaries like of Fidel Castro and Ernesto Che Guevara, as well as the world's rich and famous.
Read more at telegraph.co.uk...
