Padróns Celebrate 45th Anniversary With New Cigar

David Savona
Posted: September 8, 2009

Forty-five years ago today, José Orlando Padrón formed the cigar company that bears his name. The Cuban émigré, who came to the United States in the early 1960s with nothing more than a few hundred dollars and a solid work ethic, worked as a landscaper and a carpenter and used the money he saved to form a small cigar company to make cigars like the ones he grew up smoking in Cuba.

"I managed to put together $600, and I rented a space. It was very small," Padrón told Cigar Aficionado in 2005. "I was a big smoker in Cuba. I loved cigars. This is something you carry in your blood. I was born in the middle of all that, and that is why I love it so much. When I arrived in Miami, the only tobacco here was the so-called Philippine kind. It cost six or seven cents. You cannot imagine what I went through to smoke a good cigar. Then I said, 'I am going to build a cigar factory in Miami, because Cubans here would miss Cuba, but not Cuban cigars, if I made a good smoke.' I accomplished this and the reason is I had my clients behind me."

The Padrón family celebrates 45 years of rolling cigars.

To celebrate the milestone of reaching 45 years in business, the Padrón family released the Padrón Family Reserve No. 45, a six-inch long, 52 ring gauge, box-pressed cigar made from very old Nicaraguan tobaccos. The cigars will be made in very limited quantities, and shipped at various times. Most of the cigars in this initial shipment are maduro, but some have natural wrappers. "The tobacco inside is aged for 10 years," said Jorge Padrón. The cigars will retail for $25.80.

The company timed the shipments so that the cigars would be on sale today, for the anniversary.

"Two days ago we started shipping," company president Jorge Padrón said on Friday. "They're going to hit stores more or less on the eighth."

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