I’ve always liked the Padilla cigar band. It’s a little bit too big for a robusto sized cigar, but it’s bold without being overbearing — it’s an unusual and striking shape, with a blunted peak at the top. It always intrigued me, but I never really recognized it for what it was until I read an interview with Ernesto Padilla where he said that the crown of the image represents the nib of a fountain pen, in tribute to his father, the Cuban poet Heberto Padilla.

I do have a few interests outside of cigars (believe it or not) and one of them is literature. I hadn’t heard of Heberto Padilla, so I checked out a book of his poems from the library. His poems are like a great cigar: balanced, full flavored, and serene.  He was a true artist, and instead of a cigar review I’d like to offer a brief biography and a selection from his work with the sincere hope that you will look into it as well.

Remembered primarily as a man of letters, Heberto Padilla was initially a supporter but later an outspoken critic of the Castro regime. He was born in the province of Pinar del Rio in 1932, and his first book of poems was published at the age of 16. Soon after that he went to the United States and spent most of the 1950’s here. In 1959 he returned to Cuba with great optimism for the future when the dictator Fulgencio Batista was overthrown. He took an active role in the new revolutionary government, helping to edit the literary weekly Lunes de Revolucion with his friend, the great Cuban writer Guillermo Cabrera Infante (who incidently wrote my favorite book about cigars, Holy Smoke.) Padilla also reported for the government press agency from Eastern Europe and Moscow, places that would give him further insight into the threats that communism might one day pose for Cuban artists.

Gradually the political climate in Cuba began to chill and Padilla saw the threats of oppression take hold — the govemment discontinued Lunes de Revolucion, refused to publish Cabrera Infante’s work, and in 1968 Padilla himself became the focus of controversy.

Padilla’s book of poems, Fuera del Juego (Out of the Game) was entered into the Julian del Casal poetry competition, a contest sponsored by the Cuban Union of Writers and Artists. Despite state pressure on the judges to deny him the award, the judges agreed: even with its open criticism of the Cuban government’s treatment of artists and writers, Fuera del Juego was the superior entry. It was published, but under a shroud of suspicion cast by a preface that warned readers about its dangerously counter-revolutionary tendencies.

Padilla continued to write and air his controversial views despite the climate of hostility gathering around him. In 1971 he read from a collection of poems brazenly called Provocaciones, which led the regime to finally exercise its despotic power over the poet: he was arrested, jailed, and brutalized; his wife, the writer Belkis Cuza Malé , was arrested without cause, and finally he was forced to appear before the Writer’s Union to confess his work as counter-revolutionary. He was also made to denounce other writers, including his wife, as traitors to the revolution.

After a sentence of forced labor, Padilla was allowed to work as a translator while under government watch. He was not allowed to publish, but he managed somehow to get some of his poems to the United States where they were published in the New York Review of Books and later collected in the book Legacies.

In 1980, Castro unexpectedly allowed a number of dissidents to leave Cuba, and with the support of Senator Ted Kennedy and the author Bernard Malamud, Heberto Padilla was able to emigrate to the U.S.

Song of the Juggler

General, there’s a battle

between your orders and my songs.

It goes on all the time:

night, day.

It knows neither tiredness or sleep–

a battle that has gone on for many years,

so many that my eyes have never seen a sunrise

in which you, your orders, your arms, your trenches

did not figure.

A rich battle

in which, aesthetically speaking, my rags

and your uniform face off.

A theatrical battle–

it only lacks dazzling stage sets

where comedians might come on from anywhere

raising a rumpus as they do in carnivals,

each one showing off his loyalty and valor.

General, I can’t destroy your fleets or your tanks

and I don’t know how long this war will last

but every night one of your orders dies without

being followed,

and, undefeated, one of my songs survives.

–Heberto Padilla

From Legacies

(translated by Alastair Reid and Andrew Hurley)

In the 50’s the M & N Company was using more Cuban tobacco than ever before, and to facilitate their manufacturing process the company moved to Tampa, Florida. One of J.C. Newman’s dreams was to have a truly “premium” cigar in the M & N stable; Stanford accomplished this with the acquisition of the Cuesta Rey brand from Karl Cuesta. His next problem was how to competitively market his new premium, the Cuesta Rey Palma Supreme, at 26 cents:

A fellow will try a new cigar, like it, and never buy it again. He goes back to the brand he is used to. It’s like a marriage. A man can go out with a girl on the side and think she’s the best woman in the world, spend the whole night with her, but in the morning he’s forgotten her name and he goes right back to Mamma. I often told our salesmen that we were only going to get as many conversions to our brand as there were divorces.

His solution was to market a new line, the Cuesta Rey “Number 95.” The numbered name was distinguished and unlike the competing brands. And he did something else to distinguish it from the others: he raised the price from the standard premium price of 26 cents to 35 cents! (A tactic still in use today by premium cigar makers, if I might add.)

The use of 100 percent high quality Cuban tobacco was also a factor in the success of the new Cuesta Rey. This involved numerous trips to Cuba to inspect the tobacco, and as it turns out, the fertilizer.

My visits to Cuban tobacco plantations always began the same way: The tobacco grower led me straight to the largest pile of cow manure on his farm. “Just look at that nice big pile!” he would say, beaming with pride. As my tour of the plantation continued, the farmer inevitably called my attention to every immense pile we came across.

One of Newman’s primary suppliers in Cuba was Carlos Toraño Sr., who was betrayed by Castro after the revolution and by Newman’s account appeared in person to seize Toraño’s farms. (This was Toraño’s reward for helping Castro finance the revolution, believing Castro’s declaration that he was not a communist to be sincere.) But the revolution had repercussions for Newman as well, especially after Kennedy signed the Cuban Embargo into law.

The Tampa cigar manufacturers stored most of their tobacco in warehouses in Havana and had it sent to them as needed on a ship called The Privateer that traveled between Havana and Tampa twice a week.

One man convinced me to prepare for the day when The Privateer might no longer be allowed to bring Cuban tobacco into the United States: Angel Oliva, one of the most prominent leaf tobacco dealers in Havana and Tampa, and one of the fairest, most honorable businessmen I knew. He was convinced that the Cuban situation was only going to get worse. He believed the U.S. would soon be forced to embargo Cuban tobacco in retaliation for Castro’s increasingly hostile conduct. In July of 1960, Angel invited me to visit a tobacco grower and packer in Quincy, Florida, the same tobacco-growing region I had turned to when Connecticut Shade became prohibitively expensive after World War II.

At first, I declined Angel’s invitation. Why buy Florida tobacco when I could still get it from Cuba? But Angel was persistent. He practically dragged me to Quincy, even paid for my plane ticket. In Quincy, we discussed the possibility of growing candela wrapper. The tobacco dealers did not want to produce the candela tobacco unless someone was prepared to buy it. I agreed to put up the money for an experiment to produce about 100 bales.

When the tobacco was ready, I took fifty bales and encouraged Angel to take the other fifty as samples to show other cigar manufacturers. I wanted to make this wrapper tobacco popular so that it would be accepted by consumers and the industry. Most of the manufacturers wouldn’t even look at it. They quickly changed their tune when, four months later, the embargo Angel had predicted came to fruition. The other Tampa cigar manufacturers then followed my lead, placing orders with Angel Oliva for more than 6,000 bales of Quincy candela wrapper

Eventually Cuban wrapper would be supplanted in the U.S. by Cameroon leaf, which was controlled by a French monopoly. Cameroon leaf was auctioned off at events called “Inscriptions,” and at one of these Stanford had yet another opportunity to display his business acumen.

One year, when the Cameroon tobacco crop was in short supply, I set an Inscription record for the highest bid ever offered in the auction’s history. I joked that if one of my employees had paid that price, I would have fired him. If I had been working as tobacco buyer for someone else, I’m sure they would have fired me too.

I believed that if we had the highest quality tobacco, our cigars would sell; that the bitterness of poor quality remains in a smoker’s mouth long after the sweetness of low price is forgotten. And I was right.

In 1986 Carlos Fuente approached Newman with a proposition. Fuente wanted out of the machine-made cigar business he had in Tampa to concentrate on his hand-made cigars in the Dominican Republic. He asked Newman if he would interested in taking over his Tampa brands. Newman did the math and found that he couldn’t make a profit on this deal. But he said he’d do it anyway, on one condition: that Carlos Fuente make premium hand-made cigars for the Newman outfit. He agreed, and soon Fuente was producing La Unica for Newman, followed soon by Cuesta Rey. As the cigar boom caught fire in the late 90’s the Newman-Fuente combo came up a number of super-premium smokes, among them the Diamond Crown which features tobacco aged for five years and an inspection regimen so stringent that only fifteen of every fifty cigars produced are approved for sale.

Today the Newman family and the Fuente family work side by side as cigar families; in fact their website is just that: http://www.cigarfamily.com/

Cigar Family is a fascinating read for anyone interested in the American cigar industry. And for anyone who enjoys Diamond Crown, Cuesta Rey, La Unica, or any of the other great cigars from the Newmans—it’s required reading.

And a great deal on Newman’s Cuesta Rey Centro Fino cigars is available by joining the Connoisseur Club by J. C. Newman.

Stay tuned for a review of a Diamond Crown Maximus pyramid which has been beckoning to me from the humidor…

Stanford Newman is the chairman of the J.C. Newman Company, makers of Cuesta Rey, La Unica, and Diamond Crown cigars.

Published in 1999 by Forbes, Cigar Family is both a family history and a portrait of a cigar business that stretches from the late nineteenth century to today.

Newman’s book is a combination of biography, American cigar history, and business advice. He describes in detail the vicissitudes of the cigar business over the years, an industry that has been through numerous booms and busts.

Stanford Newman’s father, Julius "J.C." Newman., started rolling “buckeye” cigars in a barn in Cleveland in 1895. He was an independent contractor, selling his cigars to saloons and grocers. As he garnered more business, he hired assistants to roll cigars, and soon he was managing a small cigar company.

All cigars were hand-made up until the 20’s when machine-made cigars became more prominent. Consumers were far more price conscious at that time, and tended to smoke a lot more than they do now, up to five or six cigars a day. Newman mentions a number of times how raising the price of his cigars by a penny lost his company half its business.

Among the many interesting historical facts noted by Newman is the effect World War I had on the cigar industry:

The financial crisis of 1920 pulled the rug out from under many industries. Inventory values dropped over fifty percent. The most serious problem for the cigar industry was that in the 1920s, cigarettes became more popular than cigars for the first time in history. This happened due to the fact that the Red Cross had supplied millions of cigarettes to American soldiers during World War I. Many a soldier returned from Europe with a new taste for cigarettes.

But the M & N Co. pulled through this crisis with superior marketing and salesmanship. Innovations in technology and the courage to experiment were also reasons for the Newman family’s success. In fact, J.C. Newman was the first one to use cello as a packaging for cigars:

…The Package Machinery Company had introduced a machine in 1918 that encased cigars in a foil wrapper, and this had become a popular method of packaging cigars for several years. However, while foil helped protect cigars, it also prevented consumers from seeing what was inside. Too often, when smokers removed the foil, they discovered damaged or off-colored cigars inside. By 1925, the public had refused to buy cigars encased in foil.

…My father was well aware of the problem. In 1927, a local company that made cellophane bags for peanuts approached him about packaging multiple cigars in cellophane pouches; he immediately recognized the potential in cellophane. It would help protect cigars from drying out, while allowing consumers to see what they were getting. However, he did not like the idea of placing several cigars in a cellophane bag. He felt the best way to protect and present cigars would be to cellophane them individually. Thus, Student Prince became the first cigar in the industry to be individually wrapped in cellophane. Individually cellophaning cigars soon became standard practice throughout the cigar industry.

Newman’s story shows him to be a man who would probably have been successful in any business. He just happened to be born into the cigar business. After serving in the Air Force during World War II, he returned to join his father in the cigar industry, but never having been a smoker he was unfamiliar with the product.

As I contemplated my impeding return to the cigar industry, I decided that my first order of business would be to improve our tobacco blends. To do that, I would have to acquire a taste for cigars. It was time to become a cigar smoker. I wrote to my father and asked him to send me a box of fifty cigars…. Shortly thereafter a box of Student Prince cigars arrived for me at Fort Dix. At the first opportunity, I settled down for my first smoke.. I already had a good palate for food and wine. I expected it would be easy to develop a taste for cigars. I soon discovered just how hard it could be. The cigars were so strong to me that I became extremely nauseated. It took me a full month smoking two cigars a day to become accustomed to them. By the time I finished the box of Student Prince, I was prepared to become a tobacco blender.

He had more preparation than that, however. Just before the war he spent eight months sorting tobacco in Connecticut, during which time he was required to report on what he was learning to his father. Indeed, his father was a taskmaster, but it certainly paid off for the Newman family in the end.

Part Two coming soon…