| Dominican Style |
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Cigar sales, of course, are driven by quality—but also by force of personality. Like cult winemakers and Food Network chefs, cigarmakers today enjoy niche celebrity, their faces familiar to their devotees. In the Dominican, the industry has sired a breed of vivid personae, from patriarchal dons like Carlos Fuente Jr., a third-generation cigarmaker who rarely appears in public without a guayabera shirt and Panama hat and who jet-sets in the company of Hollywood stars, to Avo Uvezian, a dapper, piano-playing octogenarian. Uvezian’s cigars are made by the Tabadom factory in Santiago, a high-end cigar manufacturer that also produces such legendary brands as Davidoff. Uvezian’s fondness for white suits has prompted peers to dub him “Colonel Sanders with a keyboard.”Fine cigars come wrapped in romance and mystique, their producers perceived as embodiments of a rarefied lifestyle. They golf. They sport-fish. They raise and ride horses. In marketing campaigns, and in the public imagination, their days play out as tropical idylls: A gentleman farmer, shaded by a broad-brimmed hat, puffs on a Partagas while peering from his hacienda over green seas of tobacco plants. While this is partly true, reality provides a more urbane picture. Many big-name cigarmakers wing back and forth between their factories in the Dominican and the lavish South Florida residences where they make their second homes. When he’s not working, Daniel Núñez, president and COO of General Cigar Co., which produces such premium brands as Punch and Cohiba, escapes to his second-home “hideout” at La Playa Grande, on the DR’s northern coast, to golf the seaside Robert Trent Jones–designed links. Aside from cigars and golfing, his passions revolve around vintage automobiles, and he often spends weekends tinkering with a personal treasure: a sky-blue 1967 convertible Mustang with a white top and all original parts. But for sheer financial muscle, it’s hard to match Guillermo León, vice president of La Aurora, a subsidiary of Léon Jimenes, and scion of one of the richest dynasties in the Caribbean. The family empire began with tobacco in the early 1900s but now extends across vast holdings that include Presidente, the Dominican’s bestselling beer. The family is also one of the DR’s most philanthropically inclined, and the Centro León in Santiago—home to what is considered the finest museum in the country—is the jewel in the crown of the family’s civic gifts. Inevitably, the whiff of fine cigars attracts not only money but also men with lavish tastes and flamboyant styles. Once a tweedy figure in a leather-bound library, today’s cigar enthusiast is just as likely a swashbuckling outdoorsman or a smartly dressed stockbroker lighting up in a trendy downtown lounge. Even in the República Dominicana, where cigarettes come relatively cheap and Marlboros outsell Macanudos by large margins, plush operations have emerged to accommodate a clientele of means. |
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