At 68 years old, Doña Ángela Evangelina Cruz Cruz has accumulated more than five decades of experience dedicated to tobacco. She has known no other employer throughout her life; from this craft, she obtained the necessary resources to build a home and raise a son, who now follows his own path.
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Born in Jalapa, Nicaragua, she is a resident of the Santa Rosa community, an area far from the municipal center. For this reason, Doña Ángela enjoys a special work schedule in consideration of her age and travel times.
“I have to leave home around six in the morning to try to arrive by my start time –but always with a good attitude– accompanied by the Almighty. It’s true I can’t always arrive on time, but it’s okay because they give me permission here.”
Her work as a tobacco stringer began at the age of 13 at the El Coyol farm. “At that age, a man named Ariel Chávez told me to come work here, and it was the Somozista guards who taught me how to string.”
That part of the farm predated the arrival of Don Sixto and Ernesto Plasencia, the second and third generations of tobacco growers who traveled from Cuba to Nicaragua.
Thus, Doña Ángela has been a witness to all the changes the tobacco industry has undergone in Nicaragua over the last 50 years. In fact, she saw her father work the harvests on lands owned by then-president Anastasio Somoza Debayle.
From that era, she remembers a group of 40 to 50 women working in the curing barns, accumulating cujes –the long poles from which the leaves hang in groups of 23, 35, 40, and 70 pairs during drying and curing. These units make up the weekly goal of 3,000 pairs, which defines her earnings at the end of the week.
Ángela never married, but she is the mother of a son who managed to study “as far as he wanted to,” she notes, and who currently works in journalism. Furthermore, thanks to her work, she was able to build her small home twice –after it was devastated by a fire, it now stands again.
Her family was also dedicated to the fields their entire lives: her father, sisters, and brother worked in tobacco, and her mother cultivated beans and made hand-pressed tortillas. These hardworking people were the example that allowed her to move forward.
In the past, she also participated in planting, and “when there is no harvest, I also wash clothes, I clean, whatever… I know how to do everything they set before me, except steal.”
Fifty years ago, Doña Ángela had the strength and vitality to deliver two full quotas daily. Now, in recognition of her lifelong trajectory, Humo Selecto allows her to complete half a quota during a reduced five-hour workday.
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