Cuba’s Leaf, Rewritten: Two Centuries of Seed, Science, and the Taste of Habanos
If you lined up cigars from every decade of the last two hundred years and smoked them blind, you wouldn’t just taste time—you’d taste Cuba changing its tobacco. The island’s story begins with native “criollo” leaf and ends—so far—with carefully engineered hybrids born of state labs and field trials. In between came wars, nationalization, plagues of blue mold, and a quiet revolution in seed that altered the way Cuban cigars burn, smell, and age. The shorthand version is simple: criollo gave way to corojo, disease humbled both, “Habana” hybrids tried to rescue yield and wrapper, and late-1990s releases such as Criollo ’98 and Corojo ’99 reshaped modern Habanos. What follows is the long version—the one that explains how many times Cuba really changed its tobacco, why it had to, and what’s different in the smoke because of it.
The nineteenth-century backbone of Cuban tobacco was criollo, a catch-all for native seed that had been selected on Cuba for generations. By the early-to-mid twentieth century, criollo had been refined and, crucially, complemented by corojo, a line selected in Vuelta Abajo that excelled as wrapper: thinner, oilier, more elastic, and richly aromatic. For decades, criollo and corojo were the twin pillars of “Cuban taste”—criollo widely used for filler and binder, corojo prized for wrappers on the island’s great marcas. Contemporary histories of production note that by around 1940 criollo was the improved “standard,” with corojo a later sub-variety for wrapper; taken together, they defined the pre-hybrid era of Cuban leaf.
What upended that golden marriage was biology. In the late twentieth century, blue mold (Peronospora tabacina) and other diseases ravaged susceptible strains, and corojo in particular proved fragile. In response, Cuba centralized research after the Revolution, and the state—through the tobacco research institute—pursued disease-resistant selections and crosses. By the 1990s Cuba was fielding new “Habana” hybrids that could survive disease while still making decent wrapper: Habana 92 and, more famously, Habana 2000 (often shortened to H2000). Habana 2000 was introduced in 1992 with the explicit aim of improving resistance and wrapper yield. On paper, it worked; in practice, smokers and makers complained of inconsistency and combustion quirks, especially as H2000 migrated to non-Cuban fields abroad. The “Habano/Habano 2000” period mattered because it marked the first large-scale, state-driven seed overhaul in modern Cuban history—an admission that romance without agronomy would keep losing to mold.
By the late 1990s, Cuba pivoted again. Scientists and agronomists released Criollo ’98 (a blue-mold-resistant hybrid deriving from earlier Habana lines) and Corojo ’99 as the island’s next generation of core seed. These were not marketing names; they were answers to agronomic problems. A seed scientist quoted by Cigar Aficionado described the program’s four-point goal—resistance to blue mold, shank diseases, and more—placing Criollo ’98 and Corojo ’99 at the center of the solution, and later pointing to Criollo 2010 as a refinement. Trials comparing the then-current commercial standards (Habana 92, H2000) to Criollo ’98/Corojo ’99 reported higher yields and better wrapper percentages for the new pair. In other words, the late-’90s shift wasn’t cosmetic; it was measurable in bales and boxes.
So how many times did Cuba “change” its tobacco across two centuries? If you’re counting major seed eras that rolled through farms and factories, you can trace at least four: the criollo/corojo landrace era; the Habana 92 / Habana 2000 stopgap in the early-to-mid ’90s; the Criollo ’98 / Corojo ’99 modernization at the decade’s end; and the post-2000 refinements (including Criollo 2010) that tuned disease resistance and yield. You can add smaller, local selections and experimental lots, but those are the big pivots—the moments when what you smoked was different because the plant itself had been changed.
From Corojo’s Romance to Hybrid Reality
Corojo’s mythos is deserved. Selected in Vuelta Abajo, it gave Cuba that plush, spicy wrapper that old-timers still call the “Cuban kiss.” But corojo’s weakness—its susceptibility to diseases—forced the island to ask hard questions. The 1990s were especially bruising: crop losses and quality problems coincided with political and economic strain. The state responded with central planning and seed science. Habana 2000 seemed, at first, like salvation: more resistant leaf, more exportable wrapper. Yet as more factories rolled it and more smokers lit it, reports of burn and flavor inconsistency mounted. Outside Cuba, growers loved H2000’s disease tolerance but admitted it could be moody at the match. It didn’t destroy Cuban character, but it dimmed the romance. The fix was the late-decade turn to Criollo ’98/Corojo ’99. These hybrids were engineered to resist blue mold and improve yield without losing the pliancy and oil content that make great wrapper. Even seed vendors who summarize the agronomy in simple terms still underline the point: Criollo ’98 traces to crosses like Habana 92 × Habana PR, delivering resistance to blue mold and tobacco mosaic virus and at least moderate tolerance to other field problems, all while producing useful leaves for sun-grown binder/filler and shade-grown wrapper. In shaded trials, Corojo ’99 produced the highest wrapper yield among the Cuban entries compared, with both ’99 and ’98 surpassing the older commercial varieties on total yield. The result was plain in the rolling rooms: more wrappers per hectare, more predictable bales, fewer headaches at the bench.
Those changes ripple through the broader cigar world. Once Cuba had to hybridize, everyone else did versions of the same. The very word “Habano” escaped the island and became shorthand for spicy, high-oil seed grown from Ecuador to Nicaragua. Retail and maker guides today still frame Habano seed as the post-corojo reality—originally a Cuban answer to disease, later adopted and adapted abroad. That’s why, in 2025, you can smoke a Nicaraguan “Habano” that feels spiritually Cuban without being Cuban at all: the seed idea traveled, and non-Cuban terroirs gave it new faces. But inside Cuba, the key is that Criollo ’98/Corojo ’99 stabilized the supply and let Habanos regain their footing after the H2000 wobble. Blenders could plan again; rollers could count on texture and elasticity; warehouses could age cigars without betting against combustion. It wasn’t a return to pre-war corojo romance so much as a modern equilibrium—less poetic, more reliable.
The island didn’t stop with 1998–1999. Researchers kept tuning. The same Aficionado profile that canonized ’98/’99 pointed to Criollo 2010 as the next lever, chasing even better field performance. Meanwhile, the historical through-line—that all modern Cuban varieties descend from criollo, the island’s native landrace—remained intact. Cuba never abandoned its origin; it re-engineered it for a harsher agricultural century. When people say “Cuban tobacco changed,” they often mean “Cuban seed was forced to evolve,” and they’re right. The changes weren’t marketing tweaks; they were survival.
What Changed in the Smoke: Construction, Flavor, and the New Normal
For the smoker, seed eras don’t read like lab notes; they read like how a cigar lights, burns, and finishes. In the corojo heyday, wrappers were thin, elastic, and oily in a way that gave even modest cigars a satin texture and a spicy bloom through the nose. When disease pressure rose and Habana 2000 took the stage, many cigars turned sturdier in appearance but fussier at the match—harder to keep lit cleanly, more prone to hot-and-cold runs that demanded touch-ups. You could still find magic, especially with careful aging, but the batting average fell. With Criollo ’98/Corojo ’99, the construction picture improved: wrapper yield and elasticity rebounded, and factories could return to tapado-grown wrapper that behaved on the table and in the ash. That’s the invisible dividend of seed science—when a roller can trust the leaf, you get a straighter burn line and a cooler core, and the flavors stack instead of scatter.
Flavor followed suit. Corojo’s spicy perfume never disappeared from Cuba, but the island’s late-’90s genetics pushed blends toward a cleaner, more consistent expression of cedar, toasted nuts, earth, and cocoa, with fewer off-notes of raw grass or bitter tars in under-fermented samples. That’s not to say every Habano since 1999 has been flawless—crop years, weather, and post-harvest handling still matter enormously—but the floor came up. The best factories could now ferment deeper primings without fear that fragile leaf would break, and bales coming out of warehouses were less roulette, more chess. When aficionados talk about “modern Cuban” taste, they’re often describing this post-hybrid equilibrium: a profile where the great marcas still carry their signatures, but the cigars light easier, tunnel less, and age more predictably than at the nadir of the H2000 years.
If you’re looking for a precise count of “how many times Cuba changed its tobacco,” the honest answer is that Cuba changed it whenever agriculture forced the issue, and those moments cluster in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The island moved from criollo/corojo landraces to Habana 92 / Habana 2000 in the early ’90s, from there to Criollo ’98 / Corojo ’99 at the decade’s end, and carried on to Criollo 2010 and beyond—each step a response to disease, yield, and wrapper needs. The difference you taste in a 1960s puro versus a late-’90s box and a 2010s production isn’t nostalgia; it’s genetics. Criollo is still the ancestor; corojo is still the romance; but blue mold and black shank rewrote the script. Cuba answered with hybrids that made the farms viable and gave rollers leaves they could rely on. The miracle is that, after all that science, the smoke still feels like Havana—cedar and sun and that unmistakable, dancing spice—because the people who shepherded the leaf from green to brown refused to let the seed work erase the soul.