The earliest forms of cigarettes have been attested in Central America around the 9th century in the form of reeds and smoking tubes. The Maya, and later the Aztecs, smoked tobacco and various psychoactive drugs in religious rituals and frequently depicted priests and deities smoking on pottery and temple engravings. The cigarettes, and the cigar, were the most common method of smoking in the Caribbean, Mexico and Central and South America until recent times.

The South and Central American cigarette used various plant wrappers; when it was brought back to Spain, maize wrappers were introduced, and by the seventeenth century, fine paper.