Habanita (Molinard, 1921)

Some time ago, I wrote a very mean post about a small perfumery in Havana. My fellow Smellbound blogger Violet Kolinsky, who has a soft spot for the workers, has been cross with me ever since: apparently, the people in the shop might see it and get upset. Bearing in mind the state of internet access in Cuba, this seems unlikely. Still, I love Cuba and its people very much, and for that reason the subject of today’s sermon will be the ultimate classic of Cuban scent: Molinard’s timeless Habanita.

The eagle-eyed among you may have noticed that Molinard is, in fact, a French perfume house. Quite so, but Habanita – meaning ‘woman from Havana’ – is much more than a Cuban-inspired perfume. More perfectly than any other fragrance I can think of, Habanita captures the essence of a city. If you have ever been in Havana, one sniff will send you straight back. The evocation is startling, all the more so because Habanita is 87 years old.

Bearing in mind that most people have not been in Havana, some sort of florid description may be called for. Imagine if you will (or Google image search if you won’t) a Spanish colonial town of breathtaking elegance. Every street is lined with a jumble of buildings, each with its own individual and charming architectural features. Now imagine that city surrounded by the azure waters of the Caribbean, fringed with palms, and suffused with sun and heat, brought down to a balmy temperature by the sea breeze. Now imagine that there has been a long period of dictatorship followed by Communist revolution. All these beautiful buildings have slowly decayed and tumbled down. They have been propped up in imaginative ways, and repainted in haphazard colours or with murals of socialist heroes versus American villains.

Along the main boulevards are the grand old mansions that house Havana’s cigar factories. Inside cool, dark rooms, at antique desks, sit dozens of men and women, selecting tobacco leaves, stripping out the stems, artfully twisting them into cigars and packing them into blocks.

All these things are captured by Habanita, even though the Communist revolution happened almost four decades after it was created. The first note is a sweet, sharp slap of cured tobacco leaf with a sort of synthetic-preservative edge, something like formaldehyde. I’m not sufficiently familiar with the process of cigar manufacture to confirm precisely what it is, but it’s exactly the same smell that fills the ground-floor chambers of the Partagas tobacco factory, where sweating, muscular men unwrap and thrash the enormous bundles of leaves.

Soon, the edge softens and Habanita’s heart comes out. And that heart is peach. My weakness for peach is a rare exception to the general disdain in which I hold all non-citrus fruit scents. I had a brief passion for Aqaba, which was only partly influenced by Lawrence of Arabia. I know peach is a lab-created note, not a natural distillation. And Habanita has been reformulated, so it is even less natural-smelling than it used to be. No matter. The synthetic peachy smell is just that of the cheap perfumes and cosmetics worn by the cigar-rolling workers upstairs in the factory.

Inevitably at this point on the tour, someone trots out that tired line about cigars being ‘rolled on the thighs of virgins.’ The workers’ sex lives are none of my business, but they do indeed roll cigars on their thighs, on leather aprons; and, right on cue, Habanita brings in its leathery base note, sinking gently into an exotic, languorous blend of patchouli and amber.

Habanita is a perfume of imaginative genius, and its brash, synthetic edge is all part of the appeal. Famously, it was first sold to scent cigarettes. To use a delightful expression from another part of the Caribbean, the sort of women who scented their cigarettes in 1921 didn't got no behaviour at all. Havana, and Habanita, are about heat, smoking, and sin.

As the sun goes down over Habana Vieja, the tobacco workers come out into the streets to drink mojitos, smoke Cohibas and dance salsa under the winsome gaze of a mural of Che Guevara. It's going to be a long night.