Moving Forward in Nicaragua

Posted: December 31, 1969

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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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