Moving Forward in Nicaragua

Making cigars is a hands-on business, right down to applying the band. This is a Padrón 1964 Anniversary Series, bearing a maduro wrapper.
José Orlando Padrón flew to Cuba in October 1978 as part of a humanitarian mission to free political prisoners. During the visit, he recalled on a recent trip to Nicaragua, he met with Fidel Castro. Padrón had three cigars in his shirt pocket. "Padrón," Fidel said, "I hear you've been making good cigars." Padrón answered, "That's what they say." Asked Castro: "Can I try one?"

Padrón put the three cigars on the table, allowing the Cuban leader to choose. He selected one, Padrón took another, and put the third back in his pocket. "At that moment," remembers Padrón, "there were no journalists in the room." They spoke about the prisoners, came to an agreement and then brought in the press. At that time, Castro asked Padrón for another cigar to examine. Padrón handed him the one in his pocket. "I think Fidel did it on purpose," says Padrón. "The moment I handed him the cigar, they snapped the picture." The photograph made headlines in Miami, and it didn't sit well with some.

"It was like putting gasoline on a fire," says Jorge, who was a child when the trip occurred. The bombs—six in all, three of which exploded—soon followed.

"I have no regrets," says José Orlando, taking a puff on his cigar. "Because everything I do, I do with my heart." Forty-nine prisoners were freed on his first trip, 300 on the second, 3,600 in all.

Over breakfast one morning—an open box of Serie 1926 No. 6 Maduros sits on the counter at all times, and a cigar is never far away—father and son talk about the odd weather affecting Jalapa, the northern Nicaraguan area prized for its wrappers. Padrón Cigars Inc. gets much of its wrapper crop from Jalapa. Persistent, nagging rain has ruined some of the leaf.

"Fortunately, we have enough tobacco," says Jorge, 39. Later he'll walk a visitor past pile after pile—pilón after pilón—of fermenting tobacco leaves, enough to make five years' or so worth of Padrón cigars. Every few steps he and his father stop to dig a leaf out from the pilón, tear it in half and wrap it around their burning cigars for a test smoke. This is quality control, Padrón-style.

The work has resulted in unparalleled accolades for the family's cigars: Padróns have never rated lower than third on Cigar Aficionado's annual Top 25 list, and the Padrón Serie 1926 40th Anniversary was named Cigar of the Year in February 2005.

José Orlando Padrón seems in a reflective mood on this trip, enjoying his surroundings. He appears to be scowling, but he's deep in thought, deeply sniffing the white gardenia he has picked from the courtyard of his house, which abuts the cigar factory. "This flower is very significant," he says, a smile making its way to his face. "I used to play under a gardenia plant when I was a child." He holds the bloom in his right hand, his ever-present cigar in his left.

Padrón turned 80 in 2006, and to commemorate the occasion the family settled on creating the company's first perfecto shape, the Padrón 80th Anniversary cigar. A prototype was first smoked at Cigar Aficionado's Las Vegas Big Smoke in November 2006, and the final product is expected on the market sometime this year.

Alejandro Martinez Cuenca
Alejandro Martinez Cuenca, who vied against Ortega to become the candidate from the Sandinista party, feels Nicaragua has a bright future. "I don't see people moving out of the country," says Martinez Cuenca, 59, who owns the Joya de Nicaragua cigar brand, sitting in his office in Managua. "I think there is no possibility that we're going back to the past. I am still confident that Nicaragua will continue to be a good place to make cigars and grow tobacco as we have been in the last part of the 1990s and the 2000s."

Martinez Cuenca's factory in Estelí, Tabacos Puros de Nicaragua S.A., is busier than in past years. "Right now business is very good. The word to sum it up is stability: we are a modest factory, but we have been doing well in the last five years," says Mario Perez, marketing manager for the company. The company has 70 rollers, making some 2 million cigars a year, most of them Joya de Nicaragua. "The northern part of the country is the poorest, the area most bitten by the war," says Perez. "Estelí maybe was the most bitten city. More than 50 percent of the city was destroyed. Tobacco has given this area stability."

The Joya de Nicaragua Antaño, which took two years to create, was the company's attempt to recapture the flavor of the Nicaraguan cigars of the glory days of the early 1970s. The bold and rich cigars have found an eager audience in the United States. Perez credits Antaño with making the factory busy again.

New cigarmakers have set up shop here recently. One of the more interesting additions is Tabacalera Cubana, the Estelí outpost of Pepin Garcia's El Rey de Los Habanos, the tiny Miami factory that is making outstanding cigars such as Tatuaje.

Tabacalera Cubana, which is co-owned by Garcia and Eduardo Fernandez, has been open since mid-2006. It has 36 pairs of rollers, a few making short-fill cigars, most making long-filler smokes. The filler tobacco is all local Nicaraguan leaf, with wrappers from around the world.

To help bring the new factory up to speed, Pepin's son, Jaime, now spends much of his time there: one month in Nicaragua, followed by a few weeks in Miami, then back to Nicaragua. His father does a similar rotation to ensure that one of them is at the Estelí factory on most days.

"Cuban tobacco is the best in the world, when worked properly," says Jaime Garcia, 35, sitting in front of a modest table on the second floor of his Nicaraguan cigar factory. "For me, Nicaragua resembles the closest to Cuban tobacco."

Top photo by Tomas Stargardter

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