Cigar Factory Tour

I have spent the last five days in Estelí, Nicaragua relaxing and catching up on various tasks before I head into the mysterious and at times problematic Honduras.  Estelí is a town of about 130,000, the third largest town in Nicaragua behind Managua and Leon.  It is in the mountainous region of Nicaragua, a thin slip in between the vast expanses of the Pacific and Caribbean lowlands.  Because of my hatred towards humidity, I assume I will stay in the highlands for the rest of my trip to Central America.

A couple of days ago, I spontaneously decided to go on a cigar factory tour.  I arranged the tour with Treehuggers, a local tourism office.  The only other people on the tour was an older German couple.  Our tour guide was a 24-year-old woman originally from Matagalpa, another reasonably large city in the Nicaragua mountains.  She had moved to Estelí three years ago for school.

The comprehensive tour took place in Tabacalera Santiago, a cigar factory in the center of Estelí.  There was a room for every step of the cigar making process, including box construction, packaging, leave sorting, and production.  Karen, who only spoke Spanish throughout the tour, told us that a Cuban owned and operated the factory.  I found that interesting considering Cuba is still a strictly communist society.  However, maybe Karen was strictly speaking about the owner's origin, not where he currently resides.

Street sign for Tabacalera Santiago factory

Cigar box construction

Cigar box art room.  That's Karen in the foreground.

Leave-drying

Leaving-sorting

Cigar production

Packaging

There are about 120 employees at the cigar factory.  Depending on whether they worked on the production line or in other, less knowledge-based areas, they generally made between 6,000 and 8,000 córdobas per month, working six days per week.  In American dollars, that adds up to about $240 to $320.  In Arizona, with a $8.05 minumun wage a worker would make $322 per week if they worked 40 hours.  Reasoning how relatively expensive general commodities cost in Nicaragua, it was hard to imagine satisfactorily supporting a family of four on a single person's salary.

However, everyone who worked in the cigar factory seemed relatively happy and content.  Many laborers had a lit cigar close at hand while they worked.  Although I believe that this wasn't an actual Zona Franca, the factory was similar to how I had imagined a large business in Nicaragua operating.  In general though, Nicaraguans - not just in Estelí but throughout the country - seem mostly content with their situations in life.  Although national wages are generally low, violence and corruption seem to be relatively tame.  This is perhaps one of the reasons that the United States has very few Nicaraguan immigrants compared with Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Mexico.

A content worker