Didier Houvenaghel is the author of The Cigar, From Soil to Soul and the founder of DH Boutique Cigars. In the following article, he is interviewed by Alexander Groom, the author of El Habano Moderno: A Collector’s Guide to Cuban Cigars in the Modern Era about his education in tobacco, and the motivations behind and experience with his book.

 

Alexander Groom: Perhaps to begin you could tell a little bit of your story. I've read that you went to university in Cuba. How does a young man from Europe come to study tobacco in Cuba?

Didier Houvenaghel: Well, I'm from Belgium. I'm a bioengineer. I did my degree at the Free University of Brussels. Back then I would have a cigar here and there. The traditional exposure to cigars.

And then as a bioengineer, I went to Cuba to do some additional studies in sugar cane, in black tobacco, and in biomass and biotechnology.

AG: I’ve visited the Institute of Tobacco Research in Pinar del Río, as I imagine many others have too.

DH: Yes, in San Luis. That’s an outpost of the university, but I was more at the university itself in Pinar del Río city. At the Department of Agronomy.

AG: As a Belgian, how does one come to enrol in a Cuban university?

DH: Well, you just apply. Anyone can go. They have a lot of international students at the university, like in many other Cuban universities, but mostly they come from third world countries and are supported as part of what the Cubans call ‘internationalism;’ theirinternational solidarity towards poor nations. The international students from richer countries need to pay their full tuition. I also had to pay for my books and for my food. Technically, anyone can enrol, but at the time I had a family connection with Cuba through my uncle and his wife who knew the rector of the University of Pinar de Río which helped to facilitate things. At the time I was there there were some British and German students also.

So that was that. It was an amazing experience. Living Cuba from inside you can put aside the mystic or legendary view that other nations, especially Europeans have on Cuba, which was very interesting, and that’s also when I really connected with cigars.

My second passion, besides cigars, is sustainable development and sustainability systems, so after I returned to Europe I started working as an intern at the European Commission for the Directorate General of Research as a researcher in sustainable development. It was just an internship, so only for a year.

After that I began a role in management consulting for luxury brands in Paris, as a JuniorAnalyst. This was just two small years, but it was very, very insightful. Consulting is veryinteresting because you get to know the companies you work with vertically and transversely.

And then, in parallel to that, as soon as I came back from Cuba, I started studying cigars.

In Cuba, I had studied everything about the agriculture, and everything that is the science part of the post-harvest processes, like the drying, the selection, the classification and the fermentation. But I didn’t know anything beyond that, nothing about the blending, rolling, or tasting or the quality of a cigar. I knew about the raw material, but not nothing about cigars. So, I wanted to develop that part of myself.

I bought all the books – I’m sure you have them all too – and you know that 99% of booksout there are sponsored by big companies directly or indirectly, and they are full of garbage,or they are just a commercial. They say, “when you smoke this you need to taste that,” but I say give me the tools so that I can develop my own my own truth because your truth is your truth, mine is mine and they are different and nobody's right, nobody's wrong.

So, I wanted to find such a book. I found few elements here and there, but nothing complete. I wanted something neutral that comes from the scientific, unbiased perspective. So, that whyI decided to write one, and that became the trigger for my first book.

AG: This is the first edition of From Soil to Soul?

DH: Yes, I published the first edition 2005 in French and then 2008 in English. They were only 168 pages. The second edition as you know is two volumes totalling 316 pages. It’s really expanded from the first edition, and I reorganized the content flow. And really there are some great new additions like a good chapter on aging. The first edition was already quite deep, but the second one is really what I wanted to do. To do a masterpiece. This is why I took so much time to do it and to finalize it properly.

AG: How long were you working on it?

DH: I would say 15 years.

All these ideas were growing, and I was taking notes – unorganized notes – from 2005, and then from 2017 I began to organize my notes. And I started to actively write in 2018. And I had the manuscript of the second edition ready in 2019

Then I began the finalization, which is 10% of the work but takes 90% of the time. There were so many times I wanted to burn this damn manuscript, but I thought no, I need to go through with it. It's a gift for the culture, for the community.

In 2019 I went see Min Ron Nee with one of the manuscripts that I considered pretty much ready. We started talking about it, and after three hours, we were still on page one. He took a red pen, and we went through word by word and by the end the whole page was red. I remember the following day I was touching the bottom, and after I pulled myself together, Icalled my proofreader and I said to her “look, we need to rewrite everything.”

She said “I need to charge you for that. I cannot review everything now.”

And I said, “I don't care. I want this thing to be made properly. I want this thing to last for the 200 next years.  It needs to be written properly.”

And she said, “then I cannot proofread anymore: I need to edit it.”

And this is when I understood the difference between a proofreader and an editor, and “I said, okay, let's do that” and we redid everything.

We lost six months or something in the process, but the result was significantly enhanced.

I took the COVID time to really have the time to take the time and finalize it properly, because I put so much energy into it that caused me serious burnout after the publication of the book. But I did what I did because I think it was right to do it: spreading and sharing theculture. I was blessed that many people shared some information to me, and I took this verbal information and traditional information, and I reviewed it, did some additional research, then reorganized, organized, reorganized and presented it in the way I thought was best; a scientific presentation, but without being boring and remaining simple and trying to use simple terms. The objective was not to be only readable by PhDs. It needs to be readable by aficionados and be enjoyable to read.

AG: Do you have any plans for another book?

DH: No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no! Well, I never say never, but I don't know what I would say in a new book. Who knows? Maybe something will come. At least ten years from now.