Coclé Province - Panama - page 200

bellota (palm fiber) and pita, a fiber related to cactus. There are several bellota and pita
plants growing in front of the market, so you can see what they look like. Other items of
particular interest are dolls wearing handmade folkloric costumes, seco (the local firewa-
ter) bottle covers made from hat palm, and handmade brooms.
The market is easy to find. As you drive through La Pintada on the main road from
Penonomé, you'll come to a very large soccer field on the left side of the road. The mar-
ket is on the far side of this field.
The second obligatory stop in La Pintada is Cigars Joyas de Panama ( tours
6622-1151; www.joyasdepanamacigars.com ) . The factory's owner, Miriam Padilla, began
growing tobacco in La Pintada with three Cubans in 1982, though they went their separ-
ate ways in 1987 when the Cubans emigrated to Honduras to open a cigar factory. Left to
her own devices, Miriam sent choice samples of her tobacco to tourists and other people
she'd met in Panama over the years, seeking investors for a factory. Today, Miriam and
her son, Braulio Zurita, are La Pintada's largest employers, employing 80 workers who
make a total of 22,000 cigars a day. The employees work at rows of desks in a long,
concrete-sided, aluminum-roofed, one-story building the size of a large home, which is
the pride of the neighborhood.
The cigars are made in an assembly process that begins at one end of the building with
leaf separation from stem, and ends at the other end of the building with the packaging of
the final product. From here, the cigars are shipped primarily to the USA, France and
Spain. Here, you can buy a box of Joyas de Panama's highest-quality cigars for half the
price you would find them outside the country. The cigars also come flavored with a hint
of vanilla, rum or amaretto. Miriam and Braulio speak English, and cigars are clearly
much more than a business to them.
To get to the factory from the artisans' market, just drive southeast from the market,
straight toward Penonomé (ignore the Pana American Cigar Co, which is en route to Joy-
as de Panama). You'll come to Cafe Coclé, on your right; take the well-maintained dirt
road just beyond it (the road that initially parallels the paved road, not the next right).
Follow this road for about 1km until you see a simple thatched-roof restaurant on the
right side of the road immediately followed by the open-sided cigar factory with a cor-
rugated metal roof.
SUGAR IN THE RAW
The origins of the sugar industry are in the European colonization of the Americas,
particularly in the Caribbean. Although it was possible for Europeans to import