Cuba and cigars have a longer history than you might realize.

Indigenous Caribbean have been using tobacco for millennia.

In the early 1800s, under Spanish colonial rule, the first cigar factories opened.

And eventually in these cigar factories, you would walk in and the smell of tobacco would waft through the air.

The torsidores would sit at these neat, orderly desks rolling cigar after cigar.

And you would hear something maybe unexpected in these factories.

While people rolled cigars, you would hear the sound of a daily news report or maybe a poem or a novel being read aloud, read aloud by a person known as the reader.

The cigar reader is a tradition that is still held by a handful of people and came from this fundamentally revolutionary set of ideas,

ideas that would shape Cuba in many profound ways.

I'm Dylan Duras, and this is Atlas Obscira, a celebration of the world's strange,

incredible, and wondrous places.

Today, I'm talking with Elliot Stein.

Elliot is a journalist, and he has traveled across the world finding and reporting on

these disappearing customs, these traditions where there are just a few people still maintaining

them.

Elliot chronicled this in his book,

Custodians of Wonder,

ancient customs, profound traditions,

and the last people keeping them alive.

Hi, Elliot.

Thanks for coming to the show again.

Thanks so much for having me, Dylan.

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