History of Cigars

On October 28, two of Columbus’ men — Rodrigo de Xerez and Luis de Torres — walk into the interior of what would become Cuba and watch the locals inhale the smoke of burning leaves through a Y-shaped pipe. The natives called the leaf cohiba. The pipe was called a tobacco. Europe got the two words backwards and never fixed it.

Spain had held Cuba since 1511 and settled Havana by 1519, but this is the year the Spanish crown formally authorized tobacco production on the island. Most of it went to snuff. The cigars were rolled in Seville — as early as 1676, with full factories running by 1731.

A British colonel named Israel Putnam comes home to Connecticut from an expedition to Cuba and brings cigars with him. He later became a general in the Revolutionary War. Connecticut has been in the cigar business ever since, and Connecticut Shade is still one of the great wrappers.

Cuba records its first two cigar brand registrations: B. Rencurrel, and Hija de Cabañas y Carbajal. The first American cigar workshops open around the same time.

On June 23, Ferdinand VII ends the Spanish crown’s monopoly on Cuban tobacco. Private companies can now grow, roll, and sell. Everything that follows follows from this.

Por Larrañaga is founded in Havana. The name simply means “For Larrañaga.”

Nineteen years after Ferdinand’s decree, Cuba is exporting 4.887 million cigars a year from 306 factories. Ten years earlier it had been 407,000. That is what deregulation looked like.

Ramon Allones launches a brand under his own name and becomes the first to decorate cigar boxes with bright lithography. If you have ever bought a box partly because the art was beautiful, thank him.

Punch is introduced — trademarked, according to the records, by “a German named Stockmann.”

H. Upmann begins in Cuba. The accounts disagree on whether it was the German banker Hermann Upmann or his family, but it became one of Havana’s biggest names either way.

Don Jaime Partagas debuts Partagas and builds his factory at Industria 520. La Corona starts the same year.

Emilio Olmstedt creates both El Rey del Mundo and Sancho Panza in Havana.

Cuba exports 356.6 million cigars. That record still stands, more than 170 years later.

A Newark, Ohio merchant named Daniel Swisher takes a small cigar business as settlement of a debt. His sons John and Harry buy him out in 1888. Swisher is still with us.

The first lector — a reader hired to read newspapers and novels aloud to the rollers — appears at Havana’s El Figaro factory. Cuba banned the practice twice. Radios arrived in the factories in 1923. The same year, Jose Gener founds Hoyo de Monterrey; by his death in 1900 his factories were making 50 million cigars a year.

Romeo y Julieta is introduced. It did well, then did extraordinarily well after Pepin Fernandez bought it in 1903.

Vincent Ybor founds Ybor City in Tampa. By 1910 it held 60 cigar factories and was the center of American cigar making.

Rudyard Kipling publishes “The Betrothed,” which gave the world “A woman is just a woman, but a good Cigar is a Smoke.” Also: “There’s peace in a Larrañaga, there’s calm in a Henry Clay.”

Don Eduardo Leon Jimenes opens La Aurora, the first cigar factory in the Dominican Republic. It is still making the same brand in the same country today.

Cuba starts sealing boxes with a government warranty seal to fight counterfeiting. In Tampa, a Cuban-born roller named Arturo Fuente founds his own company. His son Carlos took it over in 1960.

The U.S. has 15,732 cigar factories. It is all downhill from here: 9,877 by 1924, under 5,000 by 1935, under 2,500 by 1946, under 1,000 by 1954, under 500 by 1961.

Cigar machines take hold in America. Machine-made goes from 18 percent of the industry in 1926 to 75 percent by 1936. The same year, reporters describe Warren Harding being nominated for President by “a group of men in a smoke-filled room” — and the phrase enters the language.

Six regional companies merge into Consolidated Cigar, which makes its first national hit out of Dutch Masters.

Swisher converts from hand-rolled to machine-made. By 1927 the company has moved to Jacksonville, Florida.

The first cigar machines arrive in Cuba at Por Larrañaga. The rollers went on strike and the machines were pulled out in 1937. They came back for good in 1950.

The Retail Tobacco Dealers of America is formed in New York — the trade group that eventually becomes the PCA, and the show our industry still runs on.

Alonso Menendez introduces Montecristo. It was an overnight hit, and in 1937 his firm bought the H. Upmann factory to make it.

Zino Davidoff builds what is generally called the first climate-controlled cigar storage room, in the basement of his shop in Geneva. Every humidor you have ever owned descends from this idea.

Churchill visits Havana and tours the Romeo y Julieta factory. The 7 x 47 size gets named for him. Eighty years on, it is still the size people mean when they say they want a big cigar.

Cuba begins the year with 140 brands and 999 shapes in production. On January 2, Castro’s revolutionaries take the government.

The Cuban cigar industry is nationalized in October. Owners of the most famous names in tobacco leave the island. Boxes stop reading “Made in Havana-Cuba” and start reading “Hecho en Cuba.” The Eisenhower administration imposes a partial embargo on October 19.

On February 7, Kennedy expands the embargo to nearly all trade; on March 23 it extends to anything made from Cuban material anywhere in the world. Havana cigars are done in America. Kennedy had his press secretary Pierre Salinger buy up more than a thousand H. Upmann Petit Upmanns first.

Cut off from Cuban leaf, Stanford Newman starts putting Cameroon wrapper on Cuesta-Rey. It worked, and Cameroon has been a serious wrapper ever since.

After the 1964 Surgeon General’s report on cigarettes, American cigar consumption jumps to nearly 9.9 billion — the highest since records began in 1920.

Castro tries a blend rolled by Eduardo Rivera and likes it enough to make it his own. That becomes Cohiba, produced at El Laguito from 1967.

American courts rule that the exiled owners kept their U.S. trademarks even though Cuba seized their property. Hoyo de Monterrey and Punch begin production in Honduras for the U.S. market. This is the legal reason two different cigars can share one famous name.

U.S. cigar consumption peaks at 11.23 billion — 54 cigars for every man, woman and child in the country — and then falls for twenty years.

More court decisions settle the trademark question for good. Non-Cuban H. Upmann (Canary Islands) and Partagas (Jamaica) reach American shelves. Manuel Quesada opens MATASA in the Dominican Republic.

Cuba finally standardizes shapes across all its factories, ending centuries of every factory having its own sizes.

Cohiba goes on sale worldwide, timed to the World Cup in Spain.

The general manager of the Boston Ritz-Carlton opens the hotel’s smoking lounge with a black-tie dinner. The cigar dinner is reborn.

Carlos Fuente closes his Tampa machine-made plant to concentrate on handmade cigars in the Dominican Republic — and puts premium handmades in bundles, which nobody was doing. Avo Uvezian launches Avo the same year.

Nothing looks like a boom yet, but it starts here: Davidoff cuts ties with Cuba and moves production to the Dominican Republic, Paul Garmirian publishes The Gourmet Guide to Cigars, and premium imports jump 14.5 percent.

The Wine Spectator runs a cover story on Cuban cigars, the response is overwhelming, and Cigar Aficionado launches that fall.

American cigar consumption bottoms out at 3.42 billion — down 69.5 percent from 1973. Premium imports, meanwhile, hit a new high of 126.9 million. The two halves of this business had fully separated.

Overall cigar sales rise for the first time since 1983. Imports hit 146 million. Perelman’s first edition counts 370 brands. Zino Davidoff dies in Geneva at 87 on January 14. Habanos S.A. is created to market Cuban cigars.

Premium imports rise 33.3 percent to 194.5 million. The brand count jumps 23 percent to 457.

Imports rise 64 percent to 319.7 million; the Dominican Republic alone ships 138.6 million. 202 new brands appear in one year. Fuente releases Opus X — all-Dominican, nearly impossible to get, $50 a stick in some shops. At the trade show in Cincinnati, literally anything sells.

The top. Sales hit 5.16 billion, premium imports hit 576.4 million, and Perelman’s counts 1,144 brands — triple the number three years earlier. Newsweek puts Jenny McCarthy on the cover under “Cigars are Cool?” In November, Barron’s calls the end. Barron’s was right.

Premium imports fall 13.7 percent — the first decline since 1991 — while the brand count still climbs to an all-time high of 1,453. Everyone’s humidor was already full.

The washout. Failed brands move through the market as closeouts and unbanded bundles. Imports fall 25.8 percent to 248.3 million. Altadis is formed from the merger of France’s SEITA and Spain’s Tabacalera.

Altadis buys half of Habanos S.A. for about $477 million. Cuba introduces the Edicion Limitada series. Ramon Cifuentes, once head of the Partagas factory and one of the last living links to the pre-Castro industry, dies in Madrid at 91.

Hurricanes Isidore and Lili destroy more than 10,000 curing barns in the Vuelta Abajo. Imports still rise for a third straight year, to 274.6 million — with the Dominican Republic, Honduras and Nicaragua now 97.8 percent of the total.

Imports reach 329.5 million despite smoking bans spreading across the country. The Second Circuit awards the U.S. Cohiba trademark to General Cigar; the Supreme Court declines to review it in 2006.

Stanford Newman dies in Tampa at 90. Over 72 years he popularized Cameroon wrapper, put premium cigars in bundles, and introduced Arturo Fuente to a national audience.

The RTDA — the trade group founded in 1933 — renames itself the IPCPR. C.A.O. is sold to Scandinavian Tobacco’s parent company, one of many acquisitions to come.

Two federal actions land in one year. In February, the SCHIP expansion raises the federal excise tax on cigars sharply, capping large cigars at about 40 cents apiece. In June, the Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act gives the FDA authority over tobacco — cigarettes and smokeless immediately, with cigars left for later. “Later” became the fight of the next fifteen years.

Swedish Match merges its cigar and pipe business with Scandinavian Tobacco Group, creating one of the largest cigar companies on earth. Consolidation is now the defining story of the business.

In December, the Obama administration announces it will normalize relations with Cuba. For the first time since 1962, Americans can legally bring home a limited amount of Cuban cigars for personal use.

Two landmarks. On August 8 the FDA’s deeming rule takes effect, extending federal authority to cigars and setting off a decade of litigation. In October, the value limits on Cuban cigars brought home for personal use are lifted entirely. And on August 5, Carlos Fuente Sr. dies in Tampa at 81.

José Orlando Padrón dies on December 5 at 91. He founded Padrón in 1964 with almost nothing and built one of the most respected names in the industry.

The IPCPR renames itself the Premium Cigar Association — the third name for an organization founded in 1933 — and the annual show becomes the PCA trade show.

In September, the Treasury Department reverses the Obama-era allowance: Cuban cigars and rum can no longer be brought into the United States at all, including from third countries. The same year, Imperial Brands sells its premium cigar business — Altadis U.S.A., JR Cigar, and its half of Habanos — for $1.44 billion. And with the country shut in, cigar sales take off.

The pandemic boom is real and measurable: a record 456.3 million premium cigars are imported into the United States, up 27 percent from 2019. An industry written off as dying more than once has its best year since the Boom.

Imports set another record at 464.5 million. In July, Judge Amit Mehta rules that the FDA failed to account for evidence that premium cigars are used differently, and are not the same public health question as cigarettes. In September, Hurricane Ian tears through Pinar del Río — the source of about three-quarters of Cuba’s tobacco — and damages or destroys some 10,000 curing barns.

In August, Judge Mehta vacates the FDA deeming rule as applied to premium cigars. U.S. premium imports come in at 426.3 million — off the record years, still far above anything pre-2020.

On January 24, the D.C. Circuit largely upholds the vacatur, sending only the definition of “premium cigar” back for more work. Habanos posts record 2024 revenue of $827 million. In October, U.S. sanctions in an unrelated fraud case hit the ownership of Allied Cigar — parent of Tabacalera de García and Flor de Copán — and abruptly cut off the factories that make Montecristo and Romeo y Julieta for the U.S. market.

In the spring, temporary licenses from U.S. and U.K. regulators clear the way for those factories to ship again. Cuba postpones the Habanos Festival over fuel shortages and blackouts. And Judge Mehta reaffirms, once more, that the FDA’s deeming rule does not reach premium cigars.