Why we chose the name bariay 1492

Some things don’t need to be invented. They just need to be remembered.

That’s how it felt when Cesar Ramirez, our master blender, stood there and said the name Bariay 1492. It wasn’t a branding meeting. It wasn’t a brainstorm. It was something deeper than that, something pulled from the marrow of who he is and where he comes from.

Bariay is the name of the easternmost point of Cuba. It’s where the Taíno people once walked the shoreline. It’s where Columbus arrived in 1492. But long before that ship arrived, that place already held stories. Fire. Rhythm. Smoke. An entire culture with its own cosmology and spirit.

When Columbus first set foot on the isle of Bariay, the Taíno people welcomed him not with suspicion but with sacred ceremony. They shared what they had, including something he’d never seen before: tobacco being smoked through pipes. Blue smoke rising. To them, it wasn’t a vice. It was ritual. Healing. A way to commune with spirit and others. Columbus didn’t understand what he was being given at first but the smoke carried anyway. Across oceans. Across generations. 

But as the centuries passed and cigars became a product instead of a practice, the ritual faded. Mass production stripped away the ceremony, the slowness, and the signature blue smoke… traded for efficiency and speed.

We chose the name Bariay because we don’t believe in lost things. We believe in what’s buried. What’s waiting to rise again.

Cesar’s roots trace back to that soil. His grandfather passed down more than craft, he passed down memory. And in that memory, there’s an art to slowing down. The name Bariay reminds us who we are. It reminds us that the blue smoke we chase isn’t some new trend, it’s an ancient tradition. Nearly forgotten, now revived. It’s the third fermentation. The old ways honored. 

So when you hold a Bariay 1492 cigar, you’re not just holding smoke, you’re holding story. Legacy. Ceremony. The belief that craft can be sacred. That ancestors can speak in ashes. And that the future is built by those brave enough to carry the past forward.

We’re not here to reinvent the cigar. We’re here to remember it.

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