A Cuban-American Man Quits Cold Turkey in Miami After 23 Years

My name is Hector Ruiz. I am 46 years old and I live in Miami, Florida, in a neighborhood about ten minutes from Calle Ocho. I smoked for 23 years. I quit cold turkey three years ago, and I have not touched a cigarette since.

I want to tell you exactly how it happened, because the way people talk about quitting does not always match the reality of doing it inside a specific culture, in a specific place, with specific people who love you and smoke around you. My experience was Cuban-American, Little Havana, dominos on the sidewalk, cafecito every morning at the ventanilla. If that is your world or something like it, I am talking directly to you.

I grew up in Little Havana. My father came from Cuba in 1979 and my mother’s family had been in Miami since the early 1960s. The smell I most associate with my grandfather is Cohiba cigar smoke and Agua de Violetas cologne. The smell I most associate with my father is cigarettes and café. In the Cuban community, especially among the men of my father’s generation, tobacco was hospitality. You offered a cigar the way you offered food. Refusing one required an explanation.

I started smoking cigarettes at 23. I was late to it compared to some of my cousins, who had started in high school. I remember exactly when I crossed the line from social smoker to dependent: it was during a stretch of night shifts at the car dealership where I worked. I was going through a difficult year, my first marriage was ending, and cigarettes stopped being something I did with other people and became something I needed alone. By the time I noticed the difference, I was already a pack-a-day smoker.

I smoked for 23 years. Winstons, then Marlboro Reds, then toward the end I switched to Parliaments because my daughter told me she could smell the others on me from across a room. I also smoked cigars occasionally, the way Cuban men do, at parties and celebrations. But cigarettes were the daily habit, the architecture of my day.

My daughter Sofia is 14 now. She was 11 when her asthma diagnosis came back serious enough that her pulmonologist said we needed to audit every source of smoke and particulate in her environment. Sofia had been diagnosed at 7 with mild asthma, manageable, an inhaler for sports and pollen season. But that winter she had two attacks that required emergency care, and the pulmonologist was clear that secondary smoke exposure, even residual smoke on clothing, was a significant contributor.

I need to explain something about that moment, because it did not produce an immediate, clean decision. I had heard the health warnings about smoking since I was a teenager. I had watched my uncle die of lung cancer when I was 32. I had tried to quit twice before, once with Nicorette gum, which I used for about three weeks before stopping, and once just by reducing and tapering, which worked until a stressful week at work put me back to a pack a day within ten days. The health arguments were not getting through to me in any lasting way. I knew smoking was killing me and I kept doing it.

But Sofia’s breathing was something else. That is not an argument. That is a fact that exists in your house with you. Her inhaler was on the kitchen counter. Her peak flow meter was on the bathroom shelf. The sound of her coughing at 2 a.m. was not an abstraction.

I quit cold turkey the Monday after her pulmonologist appointment. I did not taper, I did not use patches, I did not tell myself I would cut down first. I threw away the pack I had open, threw away the two spare packs in my truck’s glove compartment, and told my wife Isabel what I was doing. She did not smoke, so she could not quit with me, but she could witness it.

The first three days were physical misery. I want to be straightforward about this because people sometimes minimize what cold turkey actually feels like. The irritability is real. The headaches are real. I had a low-grade headache for four days straight that acetaminophen would quiet but not remove. I had trouble sleeping the first two nights. The cravings came in waves, each one lasting maybe three to five minutes, and I learned quickly that if I could get through three to five minutes the wave would subside. I drank water. I went for short walks. I chewed a lot of ice.

The physical part, I could manage. The social part was harder.

The hardest moment of my quit happened around day eleven. There is a domino park near Calle Ocho where I have played with the same group of men, most of them older Cuban-Americans, for about fifteen years. We play on Saturday afternoons. About half the men smoke. Some smoke cigars, some cigarettes. It is the kind of ritual that is inseparable from the smells and sounds of the place.

I showed up on that Saturday because I refused to stop going. Sitting at the domino table without anything in my hand felt wrong in a way that was hard to explain. My hands kept reaching for something that was not there. The smell of the cigars around me was not repulsive, it was familiar and warm and associated with every good afternoon I had spent at that table. One of the older men, Ernesto, who is in his eighties and has been playing there since before I was born, offered me a cigar. He does this every week. It is his way of welcoming you into the game.

I said no. For the first time in fifteen years, I said no to Ernesto’s cigar.

He looked at me for a moment and nodded and said, “Tu hija?” And I said yes. He patted my hand and said nothing else, and we played dominoes. I do not know how he knew, but he knew. That small acknowledgment — no big conversation, no performance, just recognition — was enough.

After that Saturday, it got easier. Not quickly, not in a straight line, but easier. By the end of the first month the physical cravings had dropped from waves to occasional pulses, and the social situations became less acute once I had a few of them behind me. The guys at the domino table adjusted. A couple of them told me they were thinking about quitting too. One of them, my friend Reinaldo, quit six months after I did. He went cold turkey also, said he used my example as proof it could be done.

The changes to Sofia’s health were not immediate, but they were real. Her pulmonologist did a reassessment at six months and noted improvement in her lung function metrics. Her bad winter that year was her last bad winter. She has not had an emergency room visit for asthma since I quit. I am careful about correlation and causation, and I know her asthma involves multiple factors. But her doctor said reducing her smoke exposure was meaningful. That is good enough for me.

My own breathing changed too. I had not noticed how restricted it had become until I had something to compare it to. About two months in, I went for a morning run for the first time in years. I made it about six blocks before I had to stop. Three months later I made it two miles. Now I run three mornings a week, about four miles per run. I am 46 years old and I run more than I did at 30.

I still go to the domino park every Saturday. I still sit at the same table, play with the same men, drink cafecito from the ventanilla across the street. I do not hold a cigar. My hands are free and I have learned that free hands are just free hands, they do not need to be holding anything. Ernesto still greets me when I arrive. Sometimes he offers the cigar and sometimes he does not, and either way I smile and we play.

Sofia is doing well. She runs track at her school. She came in second in the 400 meters at her last meet. I watched her from the bleachers in the Miami heat and I breathed in the track field air and I thought about my grandfather and his cigar smoke and how I loved that smell and how it was not something I needed anymore to feel connected to where I came from.

If you are still smoking, especially if you are in a community where tobacco is tradition, I understand the weight of it. The cigar is not just a cigar. The cigarette after coffee is not just a cigarette. I am not going to tell you those things are nothing. They are real, and they are woven into real relationships and real memories.

But your lungs are also real. Your daughter’s lungs are also real. The person in your life who is affected by your smoke, they are real too. At some point, not on a schedule you can plan, the reality of your body and the people who depend on it becomes heavier than the tradition. That is when cold turkey is possible. That is when you can sit at the domino table with empty hands and still be exactly who you are.

You are not alone in this. I played dominoes through it. You will get through yours too.