Tinajero, Araceli. El Lector: A History of the Cigar Factory Reader

Roberto González Echevarría

doi:10.5070/t411000009

Abstract

Tinajero, Araceli. El Lector: A History of the Cigar Factory Reader. Trans. Judith E. Grasberg. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2010. Print. 268 pp. ROBERTO GONZALEZ ECHEVARRIA YALE UNIVERSITY Araceli Tinajero’s El Lector: A History of the Cigar Factory Reader focuses on a figure that is unique to Cuban culture. The cigar factory reader emerges, develops and endures as an integral part of the manufacture of the most typical of Cuban products, derived from a native plant (sugar cane is an import). The emblematic quality of cigars is so not only due to the economic importance of the tobacco industry in Cuban history, but to the fact that smoking was first observed by Europeans in Cuba. It was in the Caribbean that the Spanish learned the smoking habit, which they then disseminated throughout the world. Nothing could be more original, in the sense of more of the origin, than Cuban cigars –the plant from which they are made grows and seem to have always grown out of Cuban soil. The reader, the lector, came centuries later, but his art is implicated in a custom deeply ingrained in Cuban life because of this historical depth, and also because it is an activity that produces pleasure and, now we know with certainty, also death. But we didn’t have to wait for modern medicine to tell us that death lurks in smoking, we already had the presence of fire, ashes, the visible consumption of the cigar, and the fleetingness signified by smoke itself –incense is also a kind of smoke. These qualities and resonances at once made the reader a kind of priest officiating in a solemn ritual. I know of no other figure so tightly woven into the fabric of Cuban tradition or so distinctive. Explicitly and sometimes implicitly professor Tinajero’s book

Highlights

Araceli Tinajero’s El Lector: A History of the Cigar Factory Reader focuses on a figure that is unique to Cuban culture
Reading out loud did not disappear because in the Renaissance books continued to be relatively rare commodities, as we learn from one famous episode in the Quijote, mentioned by professor Tinajero, when the priest, fittingly and ironically, reads the novella “El curioso impertinente” to the characters assembled at the inn
The convention only survived in churches and synagogues, except for the cigar factories in Cuba, where it acquired a new lease on life, as detailed in professor Tinajero’s El Lector

Summary

Introduction

El Lector: A History of the Cigar Factory Reader. Araceli Tinajero’s El Lector: A History of the Cigar Factory Reader focuses on a figure that is unique to Cuban culture. And sometimes implicitly professor Tinajero’s book brings together as in a poetic synthesis these traits, thereby perhaps beginning the long overdue enshrinement of the lector as an iconic Cuban cultural figure.

Results

Conclusion