The Cuban Cigar Smugglers…

If I recall correctly there were 6 of us going on our very first tropical trip to Cuba.  I don’t think any of us had been out of Canada before so this was exciting.  My sister and her friends were all doing their university thing and they had a hook up at the travel agent.  I didn’t know much about shit back then so when my sister called and asked “are you in?” I was on cloud nine thinking about taking my skinny ass to Cuba and soaking up the sun with people I liked to be around.  

I didn’t know anything about resort ratings and I”m guessing none of them did either since they booked us a trip to Veradero staying at the lovely 2 fucking star resort.  Did you gasp? Me too after I stroked the keyboard to put this in this blog.  A fucking 2 star resort.  After we landed in Cuba we got on that fun bus ride that takes all the people to their resorts.  1st resort, is this ours? No. 2nd resort, is this ours? No. 3rd resort….now let’s pause for a minute, resorts 1,2 and 3 were definitely 4 or 5 star resorts so you can just imagine how excited we were to get to ours.  Back to the 3rd resort, it was not ours at all.  Everyone had left the bus and it was just the 6 of us left.  Off to our resort we went.  I’m not going to drag this part out because I want to get to the point of this story….so in summary here’s what happened when we arrived at our glamorous 2 star resort… We pull up, it was dark, they put us off the bus, they left our luggage on the side of the road, we had to register (it wasn’t busy) and take our own luggage to our fucking rooms.  Me and my sister were staying in a room together.  We looked at each other and started to cry once we got to our room.  Why wasn’t our resort the same as the others that people got dropped off at?  We thought maybe we should just go to sleep and check the place out in the morning…however the ants crawling on our pillows was a bit of a distraction sooooo we just cried until the sun rise came up.  The next morning we just accepted that we were stuck for a week there and we were going to make the best of it…which we did.

That night we all ended up going to the local bar, paid 10 bucks and you got all you can drink.  Well I wasn’t much of a drinker so after the one shot of a glass filled to the rim of vodka and a splash of mix I went outside to die on the curb.  I didn’t die but it fucking felt like I wasn’t going to make it out alive.  My sister and I left the club because we were so fucked up.  We left behind the rest of the crew to have fun with the locals.  Two of our friends were accused of being Cuban prostitutes that night by the local police and had to prove they were Canadian….I don’t know how much “backing that ass up” they did in that club but apparently it was a bit too much for the Cubans.  

My sister did her research on Cuba and realized that Cubans made some really good cigars so she wanted to bring back a Cohiba cigar for a few people back home.  Me, personally I didn’t give a fuck about cigars but that was her thing.  We were laying on the beach when a guy approached us about buying a Cohiba cigar, unreal huh?  He was all fucking undercover pretending to sell hats or some shit like that.  Well my sister gets all fucking excited and bang he knew he had an interested buyer. He told us it was illegal for him to sell the cigars to us on the beach and that he would be put in jail if he was caught but he could meet us later to sell us a case, yes a case of Cohiba’s for 50 bucks USD.  She agreed to meet him later and pick up the illegal cigars. She convinces me that we are going to make a ton of money when we got back home because we were going to sell them for like 50-60 bucks a piece to people.  I did the math, we were going to be rich bitches.  The sun set and we agreed we weren’t going to tell the others about our illegal activity we had planned for the night.  We slipped off the 2 star and down to the beach we headed, pitch black outside.  Fuck we were nuts!  The guy was right on time.  “come this way he says” so we follow him for about a mile down the beach and then we exit the beach onto a side street.  There were rows of shack like houses and people partying and drinking.  We were nervous as fuck but we didn’t care we were getting a whole box of Cohibas for 50 fucking dollars…we hit the jackpot!  He leads us through this gate and says “stay here, give me the money I am going to get your cigars.” We did what he asked.  He was gone for about 5 minutes and truth be told we were thinking we were going to get ripped off by the guy at this point but we held out hope.  I said to my sister “I think we should leave this doesn’t feel right” she says ‘not without our cigars bitch” so yeah we waited and low and behold he comes back with the most beautiful cigar box filled with cigars…. WE HIT THE FUCKING JACKPOT!  He gave us a few tips before we left…”hide the box on our walk back and avoid police”…so down MY shorts this box goes, I mean nobody will notice this square box down my fucking booty shorts right?  “Do not tell anyone that you bought cigars illegally or you will go to jail”, so of course we didn’t tell a soul I mean we weren’t trying to do jail time in Cuba… “and whatever you do don’t break the seal of the box because you can’t leave the country with broken sealed boxes.”  Ok, we got it and off we went.  We fucking ran down that beach so fucking quick that Usain Bolt would’ve been begging us to slow down so he could keep up.  We hid our cigars in our luggage and never told a soul, well in my luggage so I was the one going to do time for the crime if we got caught.

It was our last day in Cuba and my sister and I decided we were also going to smuggle back all the 5 dollar bottles of liquor we could afford…actually the whole crew was down for alcohol smuggling.  We were all short on cash so we pooled our cash together and my sister and I volunteered to go to the liquor store about 15 minute drive from the “resort”.  Fuck, we couldn’t afford a cab, we sure as hell weren’t walking that far and we had just missed the local bus.  An occupant of the 2 star told us he would get us a drive so we walked out to the road, he flags down a white van with no windows and two Cuban men.  He speaks Spanish to them and tells us to get in the van.  Guess fucking what we did?  Got in the fucking van….we got the fuck in the van and hoped we made it to our destination….unharmed and alive.  It was a risk we were willing to take to get the 5 dollar bottles of rum.  We made it alive, the kind gentlemen took us to our destination safely thank fuck.  I have no clue why the fuck we did that honestly….to this day we both have anxiety when we talk about how stupid that fucking was.  We took the bus back to the 2 star and began our journey  home.

Now getting back to the cigars, I had them “hidden” in my luggage…not sure how she convinced me to take them in my luggage to be honest.  We land and got to get through customs, we were scared….we bought illegal cigars and now were smuggling them back home with no proof of purchase.  We both get pulled over to check our luggage, we are shitting ourselves like fucking full on heart attack mode.  They go through our luggage and let us pass through.  I gave the customs officer a wink because I was sure he pretended not to see our illegal cigars and let us go.  Home at last.

The last leg of this story ends here…for days we didn’t know what to do with the smuggled cigars or who we were going to really sell them to…I mean did anyone we know smoke those expensive cigars for real?  My sister finds a local cigar shop and we take the cigars down for sale…we were so fucking excited that someone said they’d buy them…finally we hit the big one!  The cigar expert takes one look at our beautiful case of cigars (less a few we had already given to friends) and says “You got these in Cuba huh?” “yes” we replied, “well you got ripped off these are fake and I ain’t buying them”.

So we did what any good cigar smuggler would do…we sold those floor swept leaf, lint filled cigars to our fucking friends and got our money back plus a profit and a name in the hood as the Cohiba Girls…sorry to those reading this that remember those cigars, the struggle was real back then ~  Holla