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D.D. noticed this 3/4-size pack of Faros at his favorite newsstand on the Plaza Chica; cost: 8 pesos (about US$0.70) for a pack of 16. Faros are an old brand dating back at least to 1910, but still popular today. They are a campesino cigarette, smoked by the poor who can afford nothing else.
They've also become a cultural icon. In line with their reputation as “the finest of fine coffin nails,” they have taken on a kind of macabre symbolism for death, entering the language in Mexico in the expression chupar faros (“to smoke Faros”), which has come to mean “to die,” “to kill oneself (with drugs),” “to have lost everything,” “to fail,” “to be a loser.”
But how did this association with death come about? In Spanish, chupar means “to suck” or “to lick,” but is also used in the sense of “to imbibe at a lingering pace.” In English, we might say “to nurse a drink or a cigarette.” Thus, one theory is that the the expression chupar faros comes from the time of the Mexican Revolution, when there were many executions by firing squads. Generally, the victims were granted a final request, and typically, they asked for one last cigarette, which, in those days, was likely a Faros brand cigarette. In other words, the doomed man chupo faros, “lingered over that last Faros,” before falling to the bullets, i.e., “he was already dead.”
Indeed, Faros are the very brand favored by Teresa Mendoza, the (anti-)heroine in the contemporary novel, La Reina del Sur (“The Queen of the South”), by Arturo Perez-Reverte, one of Spain's best-selling writers of crime thrillers. This story portrays the drug trafficking adventures of the female protagonist, depicting her rise from a naïve dupe of drug gang leader in Sinaloa, Mexico, to a ruthless criminal boss in Spain.
Faros are unfiltered and the tobacco is wrapped in rice paper (papel arroz). D.D. has heard a couple of reasons behind the use of the rice paper. One is that it enhances the flavor of the excellent-quality Mexican tobacco grown in the State of Nayarit, where some 5,000 small farms produce 90% of the country's tobacco crop, thus the modern reputation of Faros as fine-tasting “coffin nails.”
A contrasting story is that the sweet-tasting paper hides the hideous taste of the unfiltered drag, a taste so bad, that 25 years ago, the story was that Faros were composed of more cow manure than tobacco. The lady running the newsstand also mentioned that the local mota smokers like to buy Faros, empty out the tobacco, and fill the empty rice-paper wrappers with the local weed. Apparently, cigarette papers alone are much more expensive and their possession a tip-off to the constabulary that one might be smoking something else besides tobacco...
But although interesting, all this intrigue is secondary to what originally drew D.D. to Faros: the design on the pack. In Spanish, “faros” means “lighthouses” and the package, in lurid scarlet and turquoise, depicts in a cartoon-like drawing, a seacoast with what appears to be three lighthouses, perched on solid rock, plus a lightship. A man (smoking, of course) wearing a suit jacket, vest and necktie, and sporting a jungle hat, stares at some unseen horizon beyond the nearest lighthouse. Who is this guy? And what's the significance of the design? D.D. remains curious…
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