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Home > Magazine Archives > July/Aug 2007 > Moving Forward in Nicaragua

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Moving Forward in Nicaragua

The Tatuaje Havana VI, known as red label, is the star attraction at Tabacalera Cubana, owned by Pepin Garcia.
The younger Garcia has a powerful build, a military-style haircut and sleepy eyes, and the frequent smile of a man who realizes he is hitting his stride and doing things very well. He eagerly hands out cigar after cigar. The tobacco is excellent, rich Nicaraguan leaf with lots of character. Some of the smokes are balanced and sublime, others as powerful as an uppercut from one of the Klitschko brothers. All are exquisitely made with the careful construction that has become a Garcia hallmark. Was it difficult to teach the Nicaraguan rollers how to do a three-seam cap, in the Cuban style? "It's not their tradition, so it's difficult," Garcia admits. "We said, 'You need to work more.'"

Garcia's father was a top roller in Cuba, making such cigars as the Montecristo "A." (Back in the late 1950s, Jaime says, the family had a factory in Cuba.) Pepin Garcia left Cuba for Nicaragua, worked with Fernandez in the Jalapa region, then opened El Rey de Los Habanos in 2003. High ratings in Cigar Aficionado soon followed. But the Garcias could only do so much in Miami, where they had all of a dozen rollers. For expansion, they looked to Nicaragua, the source of most of their tobacco.

There are differences. In Miami, the cigars are made by one person, who bunches and wraps. In Nicaragua, the bunching is done by one worker, the rolling by another.

With a nod to Cuban style, the cigars in Nicaragua are rolled with two binder leaves, rather than one large one. "The binders are important in the blend," Jaime Garcia insists. There are also no Temsco bunching machines here, not even for the Cuban-sandwich-style cigars made with a hefty dose of short-filler tobacco.

The factory does quite a bit of business under contract, making cigars for other companies. In addition to Tatuaje owner Pete Johnson and Padilla Cigars, there are Holt's, Cigars International and others. Total production at the factory will be about 3 million cigars.

When asked if they worry that quality will slip with this great expansion of cigar production, the younger Garcia says, "We think we can improve the quality." The high ratings have followed: the Tatuaje Havana VI Angeles, which is made in Estelí, recently scored 93 points.

Garcia is not concerned about Ortega. "Everyone is working in tobacco here. Where are they going to work if everything changes?" he says, reflecting on the importance of the tobacco industry to the Nicaraguan economy.

Toraño Cigars, one of the established Nicaraguan cigarmakers, has reaffirmed its commitment to making cigars in this country by recently acquiring a mountain overlooking the city of Estelí, where it will build a new factory for its cigar production in Nicaragua. The company envisions as many as 400 rollers and 400 bunchers eventually working there. Carlos Toraño Noventa and Toraño 1916 Cameroon will be rolled there, as well as C.A.O. International Inc.'s Nicaraguan cigars. The company also makes the Dunhill Signed Range cigar brand for British giant BAT.

Jose Oliva puts flame to one of his family's cigars.
Tabacalera Oliva Tabolisa has been making great strides in Nicaragua. The family-owned business (known as Oliva Cigar Co. in the United States) makes about 6 million cigars a year, about 90 percent of them Oliva-brand cigars. The rest are private labels. "People think we do a lot more private-label [cigars] than we do," says Jose Oliva, 34, one of the brothers working for the company under the tutelage of patriarch Gilberto Oliva Sr., 76, who came to Nicaragua in 1964 from San Juan y Martinez, Cuba. After working for others, in 1969 Gilberto struck out on his own to grow tobacco, but he had to leave in 1979 with the turmoil facing Nicaragua. "In between, Dad grew tobacco in Honduras, Mexico, Panama and the Philippines," says Gilberto Jr. "In 1995, he came back."

Over the past 12 years the Olivas have grown their business, surviving the tough days that followed the cigar boom and now prospering thanks to the succulent blends they make using well-aged tobacco, much of it grown on their own farms. Jose and his older brother, Gilberto Jr., show off several warehouses.

"We ferment at a very slow pace," says Gilberto Jr., a heavyset man who looks younger than his 46 years and wears an easy smile. "We don't like to bring the temperatures too high."

"This takes a tremendous amount of cash flow," says Jose, a quiet man with a dry sense of humor. He's standing among dozens of piles of fermenting tobacco in a warehouse in Palacaguina, Nicaragua. Humidifying is done the old-fashioned way here, by spraying water on the floors when needed. It's the way Gilberto Sr. prefers it be done—Gilberto Jr. hopes to modernize things like this someday.

The Oliva factory in Estelí is fairly new, having opened in July 2003. It replaced a smaller facility. The workforce, which includes 180 rollers, gets details right. Near a color-sorting table, a woman is cutting a half inch off the foot of each maduro cigar with a chopper. "The maduro wrapper shrinks after rolling," says Jose. The cosmetic cutting ensures that the binder and filler don't peek out like ankles of someone wearing high-water pants.

The brothers eschew the office and take seats at a wooden table in front of the galleria, to watch over the workers. They bring out a few robustos from 2003, the release of their Oliva Master Blends 1. The four-year-old cigar is rich and sublime, mellow and balanced. The company intends to release some of its aged stock as part of a special shipment within the next year.

"Everybody is wishing for the best, and worrying for the worst," says Gilberto Jr. of the political situation. "I have had a couple of meetings with officials, and they have assured me nothing bad will happen."

Oliva had a second cigar factory, in Jalapa, Nicaragua, where few cigars are made, but it recently closed that operation and moved that production across the border to Danlí, Honduras, joining other cigarmakers that have operations on both sides of the border.

To handle the uncertainty over the future, Martinez Cuenca recently organized the cigarmakers and tobacco growers of Nicaragua in order to resurrect the industry's trade group, which was renamed the Nicaraguan Cigar Guilders Association. At a December meeting, Nestor Plasencia Jr., cigarmaker and tobacco grower, was elected president.

"We have a lot of things in mind," says Plasencia, who is clearly less concerned about the change in government than he is with other matters, such as simply improving tobacco production. "Get PhDs to help the grower and improve the quality of the tobacco, help fight against the counterfeiters," he says. Unity is also important, should the government threaten. "We can fight all together," says Plasencia.

The Plasencias also make cigars on both sides of the border, including many for Rocky Patel, one of their biggest customers in Honduras. Patel's cigars are so hot that he can't keep up with demand, so he has cut deals with two small cigarmakers in Estelí to have some new brands made here.

"The reason we're here is our volume is limited in Honduras," says Patel. "We need production to serve our private labels. This allows us to be creative, so our brands don't taste the same. And it allows us to make unique-sized, unique molds. We can do some really neat stuff."

Patel walks with excitement through the dusty streets of Estelí, wearing an outfit that would look more at home in a nightclub than in a cigar factory. One factory he's working with is Tafenic, a small, five-year-old operation that seems to be straining at its walls. It has several dozen cigarmakers making a variety of smokes for eight clients, including Patel.

Not far away is Nicarao, a larger operation that's six years old. (It used to be called Nicasa.) It has about 120 rollers and bunchers, including an upstairs gallery reserved for production of Patel's cigars.

Patel is pleased with the new cigars and enjoys having the smaller factories as part of his lineup. "With these small factories, it allows us to react quickly," he says. "It's more custom. To change a factory with 300 rollers takes a long time. This allows us to be quick. We can't grow without this."

Photos by Tomas Stargardter

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