IT is the closest you get to a capitalist stock market in communist-run Cuba: dozens of wealthy merchants bidding high stakes for humidors packed with premium cigars.
Cuba's annual Habanos festival ended yesterday with an auction of five ornate humidors, made of cedar and mahogany and stacked with handrolled stogies, and which raised $703,560 (£361,615) for the country's healthcare system.
The five humidors sold like hot cakes even though, for the first time in nine years, they did not bear the signature of Cuban leader Fidel Castro, who has not appeared in public since undergoing emergency surgery seven months ago.
The 80-year-old has missed the past four annual auctions, but three of his sons attended the lavish $550-a-plate gala dinner for 1000 cigar aficionados and retailers from the world over.
Well-heeled cigar connoisseurs toasted Castro and wished him a speedy recovery from intestinal surgery, which forced him to hand over power provisionally to his brother Raul Castro for the first time since Cuba's 1959 revolution.
"We hope he will sign the humidors next year," said 87-year-old Alejandro Robaina, Cuba's most famous tobacco planter and a legend in the cigar industry.
Missing Castro's signature, the humidor auction brought in significantly less than the $805,200 made last year. But cigar merchants were still confident they would easily sell the humidors filled with famed Montecristo, Partagas and Cohiba cigars to their best clients.
"In Hong Kong, people buy cigars like there is no tomorrow. It is full of cigar collectors," said Dag Holmboe, chief executive officer of Pacific Cigar Company. Owned by millionaire David Tang, the company sells $70 million worth of cigars a year in Hong Kong, said Holmboe, who took home a solid cedar humidor with 160 H Upmann cigars for $43,560.
Another humidor was bought for $138,360 by British restaurateur Sir Terence Conran, who opened a restaurant in London named after one of US writer Ernest Hemingway's favourite bars in Havana, the Floridita.
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