From Cuba to Nicaragua to Miami: The long, smoky journey of cigar king Jose Orlando Padrón
Filed under: Cuba, U.S.A.
Topics covered : Expats, Smoking
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On a cool March morning in 1979, employees at the Padron cigar factory in Miami’s Little Havana found a crude explosive device near one of the accounting desks.
Lucky for them, Cuban exiles are better cigar makers than bomb designers.
The bomb, placed by the radical anti-Castro group Omega 7, failed to detonate. The discovery marked the first but not the last time that the Padrón factory would be on the receiving end of a dud. Over the next four years, the terrorist group, outraged by company founder Jose Orlando Padrón’s role in direct negotiations with Fidel Castro over the release of Cuban political prisoners, would hit the Padrón factory with a steady stream of non-fatal and sometimes clumsy attacks. By the time the assaults ceased in 1983, Miami’s iconic cigar maker had also become its Job. His factory suffered attacks by bullets, rocks, splashed oil, Molotov cocktails, bombs that exploded, and bombs that didn’t.
The discovery of the first bomb turned an otherwise celebratory month for Orlando Padrón bittersweet. March 1979 marked the 15th anniversary of Padrón Cigars, capping a decade and a half of spectacular success and growing fame for the once penniless refugee. Since launching his cigar company as a scrappy two-man operation in 1964, Padrón had grown the brand into one of the country’s most beloved premium cigars.
If anyone in the cigar business was accustomed to bittersweet accomplishments, it was Padrón. The low-grade Omega 7 terrorist campaign against him wasn’t the first time politics had infringed on his family business. After the 1959 revolution in Cuba, Padrón fled the country and his family’s tobacco holdings with nothing but clothes in a trunk. When he finally built up his own tobacco fields in Nicaragua more than a decade later, a second Marxist revolution again put his beloved tobacco at risk.
“I’ve been attacked as a communist from the right, and as a fascist from the left,” chuckles Padrón in his cigar-roasted Spanish. “But I’ve never been a political man. All I do is make cigars.”
Not just any cigars. Earlier this summer, Cigar Insider, a trade publication published by Cigar Aficionado, announced that the Padrón of Miami had edged out the Fuentes of Tampa to become the best-selling premium cigar family in the United States.
Like the Padróns, the Fuentes are led by a patriarch, Arturo Fuente, who traces his origins to Pinar del Rio, Cuban tobacco’s answer to Bordeaux. Although Padrón’s hand-rolled cigars regularly win the highest accolades in the business, the brand has never before been the official “No. 1 cigar in America.”
In July, 2010, I visited the Padrón factory shortly after Cigar Insider announced the new standings. When I was led into the 84-year-old Padrón’s large corner office, I wasn’t surprised to find him puffing on one of his creations, his face lit with a serene satisfaction, the very picture of a man on the top of his world.
II.
Orlando Padrón has the most compelling life story in the cigar business, and he knows it. His journey from penniless Cuban refugee to Miami icon has taken him face-to-face with two of Latin America’s most famous modern dictators. It has brought down upon him the repeated wrath of local terrorists and foreign revolutionaries. And it has generated wealth that he could only have dreamed about when he arrived in Miami with nothing but the promise of a $60-a-month government stipend. Added up, it is an immigrant story worthy of its own book and film. So it’s no surprise that Padrón is in the process of writing his memoirs, an early draft of which sits on his desk in a thick three-ring notebook. Independent Cuban-American filmmaker, Eloy Hernandez, meanwhile, has chosen Padrón as the subject of his next documentary.
Well before his company was producing its current annual run of five million cigars, Padrón had become the public apotheosis of the hardworking Cuban émigré done good. When Little Havana began catching the country’s imagination in the mid-1960s, visiting journalists locked their sights on Padrón as the great Cuban-American capitalist success story. For millions of junior high-school students in the early 1970s, Padrón was literally the textbook example of immigrant success: a widely used social sciences text of the time, Americans All: A Nation of Immigrants, featured a picture of Padrón on its final page, describing him as representative of “former Cuban refugees [who] are now highly-respected citizens [and] have contributed greatly to the economy of Florida.”
Today, as he reflects on his life and prepares to hand off his family business to the next generation, Padrón remains old school. He prefers Spanish to English, which he’s never mastered. His office walls are covered with business awards, community honors, and trade magazine covers, but no personal computer graces his desk. “I don’t understand computers,” he says. “I understand cigars.”
In place of the ThinkPad notebooks found on the desks of other Padrón executives (almost all of whom are Padrón family members) the father stays true to the tools of another age. On the O.G. cigar man’s desk: a jar of No. 2 pencils, an electric desk-mounted pencil sharpener, a three-hole paper puncher, some folders and a giant black ash-tray with the Padrón name in gold. There is no fancy monogrammed cigar cutter; he still bites his cigars at the end. The only modern tech in the room is a large screen television mounted against the back wall, on which Padrón watches satellite news channels from Latin America.
The library is filled with long-past-useful editions of the Tobacco Traders Almanac, like old Bibles in a medieval study.
III.
Jose Orlando Padrón was born in 1924 with a cigar in his mouth. The product of two tobacco family lines, he grew up on a tobacco farm in Pinar del Rio, Cuba’s westernmost region famed for its perfect tobacco growing conditions. The most experienced tobacco grower in the Padrón clan was Jose’s paternal grandfather, Damaso Padrón, who emigrated from the Canary Islands in the late 1800s and soon prospered as a grower. Some of Padrón’s earliest memories are his grandmother hand rolling cigars on a wooden table in the family home. Even today, Padrón grows wistful quoting the farm wisdom of his grandfather.
“Tobacco leaves are like women,” runs a typical Padrón family aphorism, “the more you caress them, the sweeter they get.”
As a boy, Padrón would return from school and clean seed-beds, where tobacco plant saplings take root. He smoked his first cigar on a rafter in a tobacco barn as an adolescent, beginning a lifetime of smoking that would peak with a 15-cigar a day habit, about the same as Sigmund Freud. (He has since cut back to eight to 10.)
Padrón grew to manhood during the final decade of the Batista regime. Like most young Cubans, he was swept up in the revolutionary fervor of the late-50s, and was drawn toward activism in the Castro’s July 26 Movement. “Our entire family supported Castro and the guerrillas,” he says. “We knew we wanted change. The problem was nobody really understood what form change would take.”
It wasn’t long after the revolution that the young idealist grew nervous with the direction things were going. “I heard Castro say, ‘Don’t tell me what you’ve done, but what you are going to do,’” Padrón says. “He had no respect for tradition. I saw friends and family members being persecuted, the arrests, the audits.” Padrón’s uncle, Eliseo Padrón Blanco, was arrested shortly after the revolution for possession of “hidden” weapons on his farm. He spent nearly a decade in prison and died shortly after his release in the early 1970s.
In March of 1961, Padrón acquired permission from the newly ensconced revolutionary government to visit Spain on bogus claims related to a family will. Just weeks before the Bay of Pigs, he took an April 1 Iberia flight to Madrid, where he declared asylum. During his first week in the country, a CIA officer mingling in Madrid’s Cuban émigré scene asked whether he would support an invasion of the country. Padrón said that he would, but claims to have advised the agent that a single front invasion would be a disaster. He was right. On April 17, the CIA led more than 1,500 Cuban émigrés into a quick and bloody defeat at the Bay of Pigs on the southern coast of the island.
Padrón spent what he calls “nine hungry months” in Spain, followed by a short stint pressing shirts in Queens, New York, before finally making his way to Miami.
“I lived in an old cockroach infested house in what is now skyscraper district downtown,” he remembers of his first months in Miami. “Back then the city was safe. I slept with the doors open.”
Padrón had no contacts in the city, where he received $60 month from the United States government. “I felt like a parasite every time I collected one of those government checks,” he says. With one of those checks, he bought a hand-powered lawnmower and began going door to door. It was while mowing lawns around the neighborhoods of nascent Little Havana that Padrón received a gift that would change his life—and become central to the mythology of Padrón Cigars.
The gift was a hammer Padrón received from a friend in the Cuban Refugee Office, who thought he might put his Cuban carpentry skills to work. During the day, Padrón cut lawns and worked as a gardener. At night, he worked as a freelance carpenter.
Today the small workman’s hammer is prominently displayed in a glass case in the foyer of the Padrón factory. It is surrounded by photos warmly dedicated by cigar-smoking luminaries like Rudy Giuliani and Arnold Schwarzenegger. A picture of the hammer adorns company hats and polo shirts and appears in print advertising. The actual hammer accompanies the family to major tobacco conventions.
It was with the money he earned using this hammer—around $600—that Padrón rolled and sold his first Miami cigar.
IV.
Padrón’s reason for getting back into the cigar business was simple and personal. “I wasn’t happy with the cigars sold in Miami at the time,” he says. “I wanted to help Cubans recapture the taste of home, even if they couldn’t go back. The cigars in Miami at the time were too mild and didn’t have much flavor.”
In March of 1964, Padrón Cigars was born in a small storefront at 1562 W. Flagler St. The following September, Padrón sold his first batch of cigars to a Little Havana cafe. At first, volume was modest.
“I had one roller, and bought tobacco one pound at a time from growers in Tampa, Connecticut and Puerto Rico. I’d blend the best stuff I could get,” he says. “I’d go around in the evening wherever men would gather for coffee, a drink, cigars.”
Sales began taking off in 1965. So did Padrón’s reputation. By 1966, Padrón was selling 300,000 cigars a year in Miami and employing a dozen rollers. His quick rise coincided with the growth of Little Havana, and soon the national media came calling, raising his profile with every story. The Padrón name was also gaining influential followers in the entertainment industry. Alan King, one of the leading comedians of the era, used Padróns as his main prop. The legendary conductor and producer Mitch Miller regularly ordered 300 gigantes and told the New York Times in 1969 that they were “the best cigars made in this country.”
Through word of mouth and glowing press, the orders came pouring in. The company was growing fast. But it still wasn’t growing its own tobacco.
V.
The dirt road leading to the Padrón tobacco farm in Esteli, Nicaragua, could be anywhere in rural Central America. Dogs run free and children play baseball and soccer in front of tin-roofed shack shops featuring little more than jars of penny candy and hanging banana bunches. But the tobacco fields here, set against rolling mountain ranges dotted with white colonial church domes, are especially verdant. The air is perfect in a way only a few can appreciate. Indeed, the high-altitude oxygen and rich soil are so exactly suited to the growing of tobacco that many, including Jose Padrón, argue that it is the world’s closest approximation to the conditions of Cuba’s famed Pinar del Rio region.
Padrón’s involvement in the country began in 1967, in a meeting that had all the trappings of a furtive drug deal.
It started when he received a phone call from a Nicaraguan in Miami on his way to Europe. The stranger requested a meeting, to which Padrón agreed. The two met at a hotel near the airport, where the man, who turned out to be Roberto Martinez, produced a suitcase holding samples of tobacco grown in Nicaragua’s north central highlands. He took one of the samples and rolled a crude cigar on his thigh, which Padrón smoked. Shocked by the familiar taste, Padrón declared: “Sir, what you have here the Second Coming of Cuba.” He soon placed his first order of Nicaraguan tobacco.
Padrón’s decision to bring Nicaraguan tobacco to Miami caused waves in the local cigar community. “The leaf brokers and dealers in the city didn’t want competition,” he says. “Everyone was very set in their ways. A lot of people not happy with the threat to the [established] order. But I was a full convert to Nicaraguan leaves.”
After he began buying tobacco from Nicaraguan dealers, he received another call from Roberto Martinez, who told him that Anastasio Somoza, Nicaragua’s longtime dictator, requested a personal meeting with Padrón.
The two men met at Somoza’s personal farm in Jalapa. The dictator—eager to develop his country’s tobacco industry—wasted no time in getting down to business. He asked his guest: “Tell me the truth about Nicaraguan tobacco. We’ve invested in this industry, we don’t want to fail.” Padrón repeated his earlier judgment that it was the Second Coming of Cuba. The meeting led to a land deal that would help launch Nicaragua’s now thriving tobacco industry.
It would also lead to the first of Padrón’s incidents in the crossfire of that small nation’s tumultuous politics.
As the company grew and Padrón’s Esteli-Miami operation matured—the tobacco was grown and rolled in Esteli, then shipped to Miami for boxing and distribution—trouble was brewing in Nicaragua. Marxist Guerillas dedicated to the overthrow of the brutal Somoza regime were increasingly active throughout the country, especially in the north-central highlands.
The political situation came to a violent head in 1978, when the Sandinistas began assassinating leading members of the Somoza regime. With civil war raging throughout the country, including the capital Managua, Padrón decided to get his tobacco out of the country before it was too late. His Nicaraguan accountant—who is still with the company—chartered a plane and flew several hundred bales of tobacco to safer areas of the country.
The decision was based on sound instincts. On May 24, 1978, the Sandinistas burned down Padrón’s factory in Esteli along with a nearby tobacco warehouse. The same day, 18 other buildings in the area that the rebels associated with Somoza were destroyed.
“The Sandinistas were taking over a lot of tobacco barns and using them as barracks,” says Gordon Mott, who covered Central America for the Associated Press during the conflict, and is now executive editor of Cigar Aficionado. “After the Sandinistas took power, the Contras did the same thing.”
As the situation worsened, Padrón moved his tobacco out of the country entirely. On July 15, 1979, he chartered an airplane to transfer three hundred more bales of tobacco to El Salvador. Three days later, the rebels overran Managua. The fate of any business that had operated under Somoza was thrown into doubt.
Once subcomandante Daniel Ortega and his Sandinistas took power, the local Sandinista comandante in Esteli, Elias Noguera, invited Padrón back to Nicaragua to discuss the future of his business. He agreed to the visit only if his employees, who had protested the new government on Padrón’s behalf, were present at the meeting. Noguera agreed. With the support of his workers, it was decided that Padrón would be allowed to continue operating in the country, and was cleared of all “political crimes” under Somoza.
Today Padrón maintains that he has always stayed out of Nicaraguan politics, no matter who was in power. “I never had any direct business dealings with any politicians,” he says. “Somoza saw the potential and helped the cigar industry. From business standpoint, he was important. Were there problems in the country under him? Sure. But I just made cigars.”
But Padrón’s problems “just making cigars” in Nicaragua weren’t over. Civil war continued to wrack the country, this time with the Sandinista government pitted against the U.S.-supported Contras. On April 30, 1985, the United States declared a full economic embargo of Nicaragua that would last five years. This forced Padrón to once again scramble to get his tobacco out of the country. According to Washington’s decree, all U.S. citizens had seven days to get themselves and their property out of Nicaragua. Through well-connected contacts in the Miami Cuban community, Padrón was able to secure a five-month extension from the U.S. Treasury. It was the only such reprieve granted during the embargo, but the end result was the same: Padrón airlifted his tobacco out of the country on chartered planes, moving 700 bales to Honduras and Tampa, Florida.
“The important thing was to save the tobacco,” says Padrón, who did not visit Nicaragua for the duration of the embargo, which was lifted in 1990.
After the embargo was lifted, Padrón returned his operations to the country, again paving the way for others. “ Padrón was a big part of the Nicaraguan revival after the sanctions were lifted,” says Mott, of Cigar Aficionado. “They were the first to recommit to the country and restore its reputation.”
But as challenging as Nicaraguan politics were in the late-70s and 80s, Padrón didn’t have to go to Central America for political drama. He had more than enough to keep him busy closer to home.
VI.
In summer of 1977, the Miami-based Cuban-Jewish banker Bernardo Benes was on holiday in Panama City with his family. Along with being a Latin American vacation capital, Panama City is a Cuban intelligence hub, and it was there that Cuba’s chief spy contacted Benes about meeting.
The two met and talked for hours about a wide range of subjects, including the possibility of a diplomatic opening between Castro’s Cuba and the Carter Administration. Back in Miami, Benes told a local CIA contact about the meeting, who in turn informed the State Department about the Panama City overture. Within a few months, the White House had stamped its approval on a secret Miami Cuban exile mission to Havana with the intent of freeing political prisoners and improving human rights on the island. It was the first such official negotiation since 1961, when Washington secretly gave Havana $52 million for the release of prisoners captured during the Bay of Pigs fiasco.
“Between February and October 1978 we had 14 meetings lasting approximately 150 hours,” says Benes, now retired from banking but still a prominent local philanthropist and author of a Spanish-language book about the trips, Viajes Secretos a Cuba (Secret Trips to Cuba). “We freed 3,600 prisoners and reunited a lot of families. We offered nothing in return. As for what Castro wanted out of it—only he would be able to answer that one. I don’t like to speculate.”
After the first few meetings, Benes decided to enlarge the delegation beyond himself and his associate, Carlos Dascal. Among the five Miami Cubans he chose to join an October 20 visit to Havana was Orlando Padrón.
At the time, Benes knew Padrón mainly as a regular customer. “I used to buy 12 of his cigars a day, the big ones at a dollar a piece, back when it was socially accepted and the price was affordable,” says Benes, now President and CEO of the Elder Brothers and Sisters Foundation in Bay Harbour Islands. “When the group of six went to Cuba we had already [come to terms] on two humans rights agreements.”
It was an emotional homecoming for Padrón. His father, who he had not seen in 17 years, was waiting for him on the tarmac. Also waiting at the airport was Padrón’s official Cuban handler, who remained by his side for the duration of the visit. When the handler asked Padrón if he would like to visit a cigar rolling factory, he responded, “Don’t talk to me about business or politics.” When he asked Padrón what he thought of Cuba’s Cohiba cigar brand, Padrón told him that it drew poorly, and that to smoke it was “punishment” on his lungs. That ended the cigar talk.
Padrón had a personal list of 17 prisoners he wanted released. He was successful, and all are now living in Miami. Altogether, the delegation brought back 49 prisoners on the trip.
Despite their success, the missions were political dynamite in Miami. As soon as they became public, angry protests erupted, led by hardliners who thought no contact should be made with Castro under any circumstances. The protests were quickly followed by more extreme displays of displeasure: Padrón’s Miami factory would be bombed and vandalized repeatedly over the course of three years. Bernardo Benes’ bank, meanwhile, was firebombed, his office picketed daily. “I was forced to hire a bodyguard and wear a bulletproof vest on my way to work,” says Benes.
Padrón’s problems grew more acute with the publication of a seemingly innocent photograph that appeared in the Miami News in 1979, during one of Padrón’s public missions to Cuba.
“I was sitting at the table across from Fidel discussing the logistics of a prisoner release,” remembers Padrón. “The photographers and press had just been allowed into the room, and Castro asked me for one of my cigars.”
As Padrón reached across the table to hand Castro a Padrón Number One, his basic cigar at the time, Helga Silva, a photographer for the Miami News, captured the transaction. When it was published, that photo was taken as proof in some quarters that Padrón was a closet communist in bed with the dictator. Omega 7 intensified its attacks and threats on the Padrón factory.
Padrón’s response to the increased assaults on his property and life was to install a state-of-the-art security system. He also sent a notice to his tormentors and the world in the form of poetry. Placed on the yellow stucco storefront were these lines from the Cuban poet and independence movement hero Jose Marti:
Los hombres se dividen en dos bandas
Los que aman y construyen
Y los que odian y destruyen
(Men are divided into two kinds
Those who love and build
And those who hate and destroy.)
When the third bomb in a year was used against his factory, Padrón told the Miami News, “This is the price one pays. I’m not sorry for what I’ve done. If I had to do it again, I’d do it 20 times over. I’m satisfied.”
In retrospect, Benes is equally defiant about the missions. “In 50 years of Castro’s rule, this has been the most successful move by the Cuban exile community,” he says. “As the years go by, more Cuban exiles understand what we did in 1978. It is a real shame that at that time they did not support what we did. A rational community would have commended us.”
Padrón doesn’t like to talk about the changing politics of Cuban Miami. Even as attitudes shift about the role of constructive engagement with Castro, he prefers to talk about tobacco. It’s obvious that he’s telling the truth when he says he’s that at heart he’s always just been a cigar maker. At 84, he is among the last of the purebreds who grew up in the famous cigar families of Pinar del Rio.
Even the prosperous business that he has built seems incidental to his love of a good fermented tobacco leaf.
“I make cigars for myself,” says Padrón. “It’s only because I can’t smoke them all that I sell the rest.”
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Here’s the photo as it appeared in the Miami News in October, 1978:
http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=71XFh8zZwT8C&dat=19781023&printsec=frontpage
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[...]Caveat Viator | From Cuba to Nicaragua to Miami: The long, smoky journey of cigar king Jose Orlando Padr??n[...]…