By ANITA SNOW
ASSOCIATED PRESS WRITER

HAVANA -- Cuba's tobacco-growing region was in the path of Hurricane Ivan but production of the island's exclusive Cohiba and Partagas cigars was likely to escape serious damage because planting season doesn't begin until next month.

"There is almost always some damage from the hurricanes, but I think we are going to escape the worst of it," Cuba's top tobacco farmer, 85-year-old Alejandro Robaina, said in a telephone interview from his farm in San Luis in the western province of Pinar del Rio.

"I think we will be able to stand it," he added in the hours before Ivan was forecast to skim past Cuba's westernmost tip. Robaina said he was more worried last week, when Ivan was forecast to cut right across western Cuba.

Planting season is not to begin until the third week of October and the remaining tobacco leaves from the last harvest in January are carefully protected in curing houses wrapped with plastic, Robaina said.

Even though there currently are no tobacco plants in the fields, already harvested leaves must be protected from humidity, which can render them useless for fashioning into cigars. Seedlings for future planting must be guarded from destructive high winds.

Tobacco is the communist-run island's third-largest export - producing an average of 150 million hand-rolled cigars worth about $240 million a year - and is recognized worldwide for its quality.

Sugar, the lead export, was expected to be largely spared since much of the sugar cane is grown on the island's eastern side.

Pinar del Rio, Cuba's westernmost province, is regularly battered by hurricanes.

Hurricanes Isidore and Lili damaged or destroyed 10,000 or more of the region's 14,500 curing houses for drying tobacco in fall 2002.