Posted: 03:43 PM ET, 02/29/08I had planned to hit up some of the key cigar shops this morning, like Partagas and Club Havana. This is where a lot of action happens during the festival. People just hang out, talk and smoke. It’s a good way to get information. Many people simply come to Havana for the festival to do that, they never attend the official events. Read more
Posted: 04:28 PM ET, 02/28/08It was all about taste yesterday in Havana. I attended two tastings. One was a smoker in the El Laguito factory, the home of Cohiba cigars, and another was a tasting in the evening at the Nacional Hotel that I led promoting the idea of drinking Champagne while smoking cigars. Read more
Posted: 02:04 PM ET, 02/27/08Sometimes I find it almost hard to believe that the cigars we buy in shops come from the rollers’ tables of cigar factories in Havana. When we buy the cigar, it’s almost as if we are standing right next to the roller and he or she is handing us the cigar. Read more
Posted: 03:00 PM ET, 02/26/08I just got back from visiting the H. Upmann factory in Nuevo Vedado with some friends from Geneva, Switzerland. The main hermano was Arek Aboulian, whose family owns Raffi Cigars. The twenty-something spent three months working in Upmann a short while ago, and he knows just about everyone in the factory. Read more
Posted: 09:22 AM ET, 02/26/08Just got back from the South Beach Food & Wine Festival in Miami. There was some golf involved, but I won’t rub it in too much.
Here are few random observations.
I attended a cocktail reception before a dinner on Wednesday night for many of the Miami-based cigar manufacturers who were in town last week. Read more
Posted: 04:04 PM ET, 02/25/08I woke up this morning in Havana in my hotel, the Melia Cohiba, and after a quick café con leche in the bar, I walked out onto the Malecon boulevard that skirts the sea in front of the city, and breathed the fresh sea air with a mixture of diesel and other smells of a bustling city. Read more
Posted: 11:27 AM ET, 02/21/08Baseball is king in the Dominican Republic, so when the Cigar Family Charitable Foundation created a school for the impoverished children around the Chateau de la Fuente tobacco plantation it was only natural to include a baseball field. But baseball fields cost money, and there was only so much to go around, and other, more pressing projects meant the field and the children’s fun had to wait. Read more
Posted: 11:13 AM ET, 02/20/08By my calculations, I drank about $400 worth of Scotch whisky at lunch the other day.
Before you go jumping to the same conclusion that my wife did—that I must have tied one on pretty hard—let me say that I only had a couple of drinks. Read more
Posted: 10:53 AM ET, 02/19/08The news last night about Fidel Castro retiring from political duties in Cuba does not come as a surprise. The word on the streets of Havana has been nothing else but that for months. In fact, his brother Raúl has been in real power since Fidel passed the baton to him in July 2006. Read more
Posted: 03:55 PM ET, 02/15/08Last week, I escaped the Northeast winter. The trip lasted only for four days, coinciding with my wife’s journey to a seven-day stay at a West Coast spa, but I managed to squeeze in 90 holes of golf. Do the math. Two travel days took away two half days of golf, so we only managed 18 holes on Thursday and Sunday. Read more
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