Missing Alejandro

IT was a lifetime ambition to meet him. Alas, I was a year or so too late.

I stood outside the gates of the rustic Robaina farm in the heart of Pinar del Rio and said a silent prayer for a man I had never met last week.

Such was his fame and magnetic personality that I, like many lovers of the Cuban cigar, felt like I knew him a little anyway.

I had bumped, swerved, dodged and scraped my way to the sacred plantation from Havana, losing my way several times and finally finding the rough mud track to the farm more by luck than judgment. The directions of young boys, old ladies and more than one mangy dog were taken en route.

Today, the Robaina plantation feels more like a museum than it perhaps should, only because of the huge numbers of pilgrims who visit to pay homage to the greatest wrapper producer the island has ever known.

Today, the last of the 150,000 tobacco seedlings have been planted in the red, dusty, mineral-rich soil of the hallowed Vuelta Abajo. Incredibly, in just 45 days, they will be 7ft tall and ready for harvest.

We stood alongside the limp looking seedlings, had a quick tour of Alejandro's former homestead and watched a 76-year-old minus a finger make short work of rolling a Robaina-grown Churchill.

But in reality, the place must surely be a shadow of its former self in the absence of the old man. His incredible wrinkled visage stares out benignly from umpteen photographs and drawings on the wall and while his nephew Hiroshi has now taken on the farm more than adequately, I can't help but feel sad I didn't make it to the Robaina farm just a little bit sooner.

In the red dust of twilight, I climb back into the car and begin the long journey home, the sound of crickets lining my route along the potholed farm track.