| Dominican Style |
|
|
|
Page 3 of 5  Witness the Cigar Club, in the capital city of Santo Domingo, a hushed oasis on a hectic street. Ciro Cascella, a skilled equestrian, accomplished polo player, and major distributor of Arturo Fuente cigars, opened the club ten years ago as an upscale expression of one of his favorite indoor pastimes. A few steps from his office is a walk-in humidor, which in turn leads into a moodily lit lounge softened with leather couches and zebra-pattern rugs. Cubist-style canvases decorate the walls, jazz music plays gently, and, on a recent evening, a drum set and two microphones stood in the corner, awaiting the live trio that was slated to perform.“Who enjoys cigars?” Cascella asked. He pointed toward the lounge, where two customers sat smoking and sipping bourbon—sturdy-looking men in slick gray business suits. “When I was a kid, cigars were for older people on special occasions. Today, who smokes them? A lot of younger guys like me who enjoy cigars as part of their active, everyday life.” Cigars gave off a less glossy glow in the late 1400s, when Christopher Columbus, on explorations of his own around the Caribbean islands, saw natives smoking crudely rolled bunches of tobacco. It was Europe’s first encounter with cigars. For centuries afterward, Dominican tobacco retained its humble roots, and as recently as the late 1900s, it served a modest purpose: Most Dominican-grown leaves were shipped to Europe as cigarette filler. Under the dictatorship of Rafael Trujillo, who bent national industries toward his personal profit, Dominican tobacco languished for much of the last century. The cigar world was ruled by the celebrated Cubans. But in the early 1960s, roles reversed. Trujillo fell, Castro rose, and Cuban cigarmakers, facing government seizure of their property, fled their country, smuggling prized Cuban tobacco seeds in their pockets. Many settled in the Dominican Republic. Now, decades later, their transplanted operations have reached maturity. If geopolitics played a role in the growth of the Dominican cigar industry, so did geography. The conditions in the fertile Cibao Valley, in the heart of the island, are ideally suited to tobacco production, with near-perfect climate, soil, and elevation. It was here, in the early 1990s, that Carlos Fuente Jr. and his father, Carlos Sr., cigarmakers of Cuban descent, built Chateau de la Fuente. The sprawling white mansion, overlooking a vast tobacco plantation, has grounds decorated with painted stonework arranged in the shapes of Taurus and Scorpio, Fuente family birth signs. “When I was a kid, my grandfather used to describe for me scenes of tobacco growing from his own childhood in Cuba,” says Carlos Jr., a cigarmaker out of central casting with his trademark Panama hat and guayabera shirt, invariably worn with two cigars protruding from the breast pocket. “The chateau is my attempt to re-create those stories. In many ways, it’s a fantasy.” |
| < Prev |
|---|