When, in the early 1990s, the premium cigar industry rebounded after years of stale sales figures and slackening consumer interest, it faced a new social climate. More and more municipalities and states had passed anti-smoking legislation throughout the eighties, and this trend only continued through the 1990s and beyond.

To look at the rankings, the world's best cigars seem to come from only a few countries: Nicaragua, the Dominican Republic, Honduras, and (unfortunately for Americans, who can't buy the country's products) Cuba.

Among cigar smokers, it is always just "the embargo." After all, though governments declare trade and other kinds of embargoes for various reasons all the time, no other such order has so affected the lives of those who smoke cigars as has the United States' trade embargo against Cuba, created by executive order by John F. Kennedy in 1962 and in force ever since.

Though the first word that comes to many minds in reference to "cigars" is, of course, "Cuba," great cigars come from all over the world. And, in fact, the expertise that went into making Cuba such a cigar powerhouse for so long (as it remains today) has been dispersed to other countries - as a result of some of the same historical upheavals...

The best cigars in the world, if you're just looking at rankings, tend to come from only a few countries, most of them Latin American: Nicaragua, the Dominican Republic, Honduras, and those banned-in-America Cuban cigars that everyone talks about.

Obviously, no one knows when the first fistfight took place; nor do we have much of a clue when the art of smacking folks in the face began to be codified, the rules written down, judges and evaluators brought in.

Perhaps it's because there's a close cultural connection between great music and smoky bars. Anyone who knows anything about jazz knows that its truly legendary improvisers - Coltrane, Bird, Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie - cut their teeth playing in bars so smoky that it's a good thing everybody was too busy improvising to need sheet music.

Hunting is as old as humanity. Fossil evidence indicates that early humans were hunting with spears as long as 16,200 years ago, and scientists estimate that we've been eating meat much longer than that - for nearly two million years, a span of time that long predates the emergence of homo sapiens.

We all know about the important role that guns play in American recreation. Consider such facts as the profusion of hunting magazines available on any newsstand; the huge number of duck blinds that can be seen in any woods; the fact that every town and hamlet has its driving range;

To cigar smokers, Nicaragua is already legendary. Through regime change, social upheaval, and revolution, this Latin American nation has produced some of the world's finest tobacco.

Michigan may be best known for its auto industry, its college football teams, and its contributions to the art of office-furniture manufacture. The fact is, though, that this mitten-shaped Upper Midwestern state has made great contributions to American arts and culture - and all sorts of positive signs,

Those who know their cigars well also, by that same token, know Brazil - albeit as a source of great tobacco rather than as a top cigar-producing nation. Brazilian tobacco, mainly produced in the country's temperate northeastern and southern regions, turns up in such world-class cigars as Carlos Torano's Toro, but the country's cigar producers themselves haven't always gotten the same respect.