He passes dull brown leaves through his wrinkled fingers. We are on a tour of Havana's best-known cigar factory, Fabrica de Tobacos Partagas, watching a veteran worker and two colleagues sorting the tobacco leaves, which is the first stage of the production process.

"They put them into four types, " says Guilla, our guide. "One for strength, one for taste, one for smell and one for the outer layer of the cigar."

Behind this septuagenarian trio is a wooden-framed compartment like a large wardrobe. Here, rows of tobacco leaves are suspended upside down in neat rows, their stems are pegged onto overhead wooden beams. "They can hang there for up to four years, " says Guilla. "It's like wine, the more mature the better."

On the second floor of the factory, some 60-70 hunched backs stoop over wooden tables. A woman seated next to us gathers up four tobacco leaves from her desktop, rips off the stems and lays them on top of one another. She then rolls the leaves in a twisting fashion much like ringing out a wet towel. "This is the second stage of the process and it's just the inside of the cigar, " says Guilla.

He picks up a plastic pot of glue from the desk. "It's organic, and it's used to stick the stem of the cigar on."

To the woman's right, already rolled leaves are being compressed between metal plates in a dated vice which looks like something out of a Victorian torture chamber.

But the front of this open-plan room is more entertaining to watch. Here, we realise the voice echoing through tinny sounding speakers around the barewalled factory is not from a radio station, but from a live in-house broadcast. A bald fortysomething man is seated behind a desk facing the staff and he is reading a newspaper into a microphone. His job is to occupy the 100 or so cigar makers as they go about their intense but dull work.

In the afternoon he reads novels. This explains how some of the cigar brands were named after the protagonists of classic literature. "That's why they are called Monte Cristo and Romeo and Juliet, they were named out of the books, " says Guilla.

To make sure the cigars are of the finest Cuban quality before they're shipped off to Spain and Canada and the like (but not the US due to the Helms-Burton embargo) they're given a final seal of approval. A petite Afro-Cuban lady checks a handful for consistency in length.

She pushes the thin cigars against a flat metal back. Happy, she rolls 'Partargas' brand stickers around the stem and boxes them.

Although Cuba is a Third World country where monthly take-home pay averages 10, cigars don't come cheap.

The factory shop sells a 25-pack box of Cohiba for a hefty 380. "It takes 82 people to make one box of cigars, that's why they're so expensive, " says Guilla.

"But I can get you a good discount, " he says, slipping me his business card. I hate to disappoint him but tell him I don't smoke. However, he's not one to be deterred from a sale. "Ok, we have beginner ones for you, " he laughs.

I manage to leave Partagas without a box of 400 cigars in tow. But if you're fond of a puff, a smoke of a Cohiba in Havana is right up there with sipping a mojito and riding in a 1950s classic car.

Fabrica de Tobacos Partagas, Centro Havana Factory visits run Monday to Saturday and cost $10 Cuban convertible dollars ( 9). Englishlanguage tours are held every 30 minutes