Part Two: Las Vegas Big Smoke Saturday Seminars

Fathers and Sons

Jack Bettridge
Posted: November 11, 2008

The opening event of the first day of seminars at the 2008 Las Vegas Big Smoke began with an apology of sorts. Cigar legend Jose Orlando Padrón, creator of two Cigar Aficionado Cigars of the Year, was regretting in Spanish that he was unable to address the audience in English, and instead had to be translated by his son Jorge, with whom he shared the podium.

"I apologize that I am a man of the jungle," he said. "But I thought it was more important to make cigars than to learn English. That way I could bring a lot of pleasure to others."

The rousing applause of the sold-out crowd signaled that they appreciated the decision.

Padrón and his son took the first segment of a three-part seminar that celebrated father-and-son teams in the cigar industry. Carlos Toraño and Carlos Fuente Jr. spoke at the other two segments, which were sandwiched between the other seminars of the Saturday program. (They also supplied cigars.) The two cigarmakers also echoed Padrón's sentiment that bringing pleasure to cigar smokers was Job No. 1 in their field.

Jose Orlando Padrón, right, and his son, Jorge.

Padrón reminisced about the creation of his cigar company in Miami in 1964, having fled Cuba's Pinar del Rio tobacco region, and the hardships that he faced as a fledgling business man in the United States. Almost cashless, the new venture had to establish an address by renting space for a number of months in order to get its license. When Padron did begin making cigars, he couldn't afford a salesman and had to act in that capacity himself. He had one size, the Fuma, which sold for 30 cents apiece or $6 a box.

The initial response to Padrón's cigars was mixed because, as he pointed out, at the time many Americans considered them too full-bodied. Padrón said that his incentive in creating the Cubanesque taste profile was that he "didn't want the Cubans new to Miami to miss their cigars as well as their homeland."

Jorge Padrón

In the early years, brand distribution was limited to the Miami area with about six million cigars a year. While his son Jorge Padrón, now president of Padrón Cigars Inc., helped expand the label into a national business, Jose Orlando Padrón said he likes to keep volume to the same numbers as it allows him to maintain quality.

Jorge Padrón saluted his father, saying: "If I learn 40 percent of what he knows, I'll be fine."

Jose Orlando Padrón added a bit to that wealth of knowledge with this exhortation: "Remember you have to stroke that tobacco when you handle it, because the tobacco it is like a woman and it responds to good treatment.

Carlos Toraño, the patriarch of a family that had grown tobacco for many generations, became a tobacco dealer and now makes cigars as well. He pointed to his Cuban roots with the selection of the cigar that he gave to the audience: the Carlos Toraño Exodus 1959 Double Corona. He explained the date referred to the year Cubans began to leave Cuba after the Castro Revolution.

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