smoker may still follow the old system and call for a cigar to his liking, by the use of the old terms and names made familiar by years of experience, but the general run of smokers can only select, from a hundred or more boxes bearing names and words that are unfamiliar or unknown, a cigar that he thinks looks like one that he wants.  It may be a “superba” an “imperial” a “Wilson’s Cabinet,” or a “Havana Kid.”

There is a wide difference in the dates given as the time of the introduction of the coffee plant in Cuba.  One writer gives the year 1720, another gives 1748, and still another gives 1769.  Others give various years near the end of the century.  It was doubtless a minor industry for fifty years or more before that time, but it was given an impetus and began to assume commercial proportions during the closing years of the 18th Century.  During that century, the industry was somewhat extensively carried on in the neighboring island of Santo Domingo.  In 1790, a revolution broke out in that island, including Haiti, and lasted, with more or less violent activity, for nearly ten years.  One result was the emigration to Cuba of a considerable number of refugees, many of them French.  They settled in eastern Cuba, where conditions for coffee-growing are highly favorable.  Knowing that industry from their experience with it in the adjacent island, these people naturally took it up in their new home.  The cultivation of coffee in Cuba, prior to that time, was largely in the neighborhood of Havana, the region then of the greater settlement and development.  For the next forty years or so, the industry developed and coffee assumed a considerable importance as an export commodity, in addition to the domestic supply.  In 1840, there were more than two thousand coffee plantations, large and small, producing more than seventy million pounds of coffee, the greater part of which was exported.  From about the middle of the century, the industry declined, in part because of lower prices due to increase in the world-supply through increased production in other countries, and in part, because of the larger chance of profit in the growing of sugar, an industry then showing an increased importance.  Coffee culture has never been entirely suspended in the island, and efforts are made from time to time to revive it, but for many years Cuba has imported most of its coffee supply, the larger share being purchased from Porto Rico.  It would be easily possible for Cuba to produce its entire requirement.  There are few more beautiful sights in all the world than a field of coffee trees in blossom.  One writer has likened it to “millions of snow drops scattered over a sea of green.”  They blossom, in Cuba, about the end of February or early in March, the fruit season and picking coming in the autumn.  Coffee culture is an industry requiring great care and some knowledge, and the preparation of the berry for the market involves no less of care and knowledge.  The quality of the Cuban berry is of the best.  It is the misfortune of the people of the United States that very few of them really know anything about coffee and its qualities, notwithstanding the fact that they consume about a billion pounds a year, all except a small percentage of it being coffee of really inferior quality.  But coffee, like cigars, pickles, or music, is largely a matter of individual preference.