It was during that period that many of Cuba’s famous cigar brands were created. The population of Havana boomed after the king of Spain declared free trade in 1818 in the country, which remained a Spanish colony until 1898. Spain developed quite the appetite for cigars, one that exceeded its ability to produce them, leading to Spanish investment in its then-colony of Cuba, where cigar production began in earnest. Webster’s dates the origin of the word “cigar” back to 1730, from the Spanish cigarro, and what we think of as a cigar today-made of filler, binder and wrapper-appeared in the early eighteenth century, according to Tobacco in History and Culture. We’ve all heard the tale of Columbus witnessing Cuba’s indigenous population twisting up tobacco leaves and enjoying a rustic smoke, and how the explorer brought the raw material back to Europe. “A dying industry with no future.”īut Newman, and everyone else in the cigar industry, had no idea that the cigar boom was about to begin, and this centuries-old industry that has weathered all manner of challenges was about to be changed like never before. cigar industry at that time in his autobiography Cigar Family. “One of compared the cigar business to the buggy whip business,” wrote Stanford Newman about the U.S. Imports of premium, handmade cigars, which had hovered around the 100 million-unit mark throughout the 1980s, decreased by 2.6 percent between 19, to 103.6 million cigars. But he was happy when his son Charlie chose a new career path, opting to become a lawyer instead of a tobacco man in August 1992.Īmerican cigar consumption was spiraling to all-time lows, having dropped by more than 66 percent between the mid-1960s and early 1990s, according to the U.S. His father, grandfather, cousins, uncles-just about everyone with the surname Toraño had worked with cigar tobacco, dating back to Cuba in 1916. “I did not think that there was a future in the cigar industry,” said Carlos Toraño in 2006, speaking about the state of the cigar industry in the 1980s. The customer base was aging and contracting, sales had been in a steady 30-year decline and the men who made cigars and grew tobacco no longer encouraged their children to follow in their footsteps. The American cigar industry was in poor shape.
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