Fuente: The House That Fire Could Not Kill

On May 17, 2023, at half past five in the afternoon, one of Arturo Fuente's tobacco warehouses caught fire in Villa Gonzalez, in the Dominican Republic. Firefighters worked for roughly nine hours, and the blaze was not under control until half past two in the morning. Warehouse #3 was destroyed, and with it an estimated one million pounds of aged tobacco, including the family's prized Chateau de la Fuente leaf, the signature tobacco found throughout the Fuente portfolio and the wrapper component of the OpusX. The neighboring warehouses were saved. No cause was ever announced.

When I first started in the Dominican, all our profit, we stuck it back. All our profit was always invested in tobacco. And aged tobacco is the most important thing that you can have.

Carlos Fuente Jr. put it plainly in the days after: "The month of May has not been good. Last year in May we got hit at the Chateau with a freak of nature hailstorm which destroyed a significant part of our crop and now this." Then the line that could serve as the family motto: "Fire, trials and tribulations have been a way of life for us. It will only continue to forge our determination to move forward and prevail. We lost a lot, but never, ever our faith and will."

For most companies a fire is a disaster. For Fuente it is a chapter heading. The house has burned, in whole or in part, in 1924, in 1979, in 2011, and in 2023, and when fire spared it, weather did the work instead. The remarkable thing is not that it keeps happening. It is that the family keeps rebuilding, and that nearly every rebuilding left the company larger than the fire found it.

1924: Tampa

The brand was launched in 1912 in West Tampa, Florida, by a 24-year-old Cuban emigre named Arturo Fuente, who had come to the United States in 1902 from his hometown of Guines, Cuba. The company was incorporated as A. Fuente & Co. in 1924, by which time it employed 500 workers. Late that same year, the three-story wooden factory burned to the ground.

Production of the brand halted for the next 22 years. Arturo spent the years after the fire working as a manager to pay off the debts of the ruined company. The restart, when it finally came in 1946, was almost absurdly small: a few rolling tables added to the 160-square-foot back porch of his home in Ybor City, Florida, with Arturo and his wife rolling full-time and their sons sweeping floors and helping after school.

1958: a dollar and a vision

In 1958, Arturo's younger son Carlos bought the business for one dollar. It made only a few thousand cigars a year, and the sale included $1,161 in assets and no debt. Carlos Fuente Sr. was ambitious where his father had been cautious, and he set out to sell beyond Tampa, first across Florida and then to New York.

In 1962, just before the United States embargo on Cuba, Carlos made the purchase that saved the company: the equivalent of three years' worth of Cuban tobacco. While Tampa factories closed their doors after the embargo, Fuente kept rolling on that stockpile, and used the borrowed time to learn to blend without Cuban leaf. In 1966 the company launched la Flor de Orlando, its first blend made without Cuban tobacco, and it succeeded.

1979: Nicaragua

Rising labor costs and a shortage of experienced rollers pushed the company out of Florida in the 1970s, first to factories in Mexico and Puerto Rico, then to Esteli, in the northwest of Nicaragua. In 1979 the Esteli factory was burned to the ground during the Nicaraguan Revolution. Carlos Sr. mortgaged his house to raise capital, his son Carlos Jr. added what he could, and the family moved to the Dominican Republic to begin again. One history of the house records that a short-lived Honduran venture was lost to fire in the same period; through it all, only the small Ybor City operation kept the name alive.

In September 1980, Tabacalera A. Fuente opened a 12,000-square-foot factory in Santiago, Dominican Republic. Carlos Sr. ran the new start on a single rule, and he stated it plainly years later: "When I first started in the Dominican, all our profit, we stuck it back. All our profit was always invested in tobacco. And aged tobacco is the most important thing that you can have." The Hemingway line became the first success of the Dominican period. Then the family started growing its own leaf, including the hardest thing of all: wrapper.

1995: Project X

The wrapper project belonged to Carlito. During a visit to Chateau de la Fuente, the family's farm, a Paris retailer told Carlos Jr. that Fuente would never rank among the great houses because the family assembled cigars rather than growing them. Stung, Carlito planted more than 37 hectares of Corojo seed at the farm and set out to develop the first high-quality Dominican wrapper leaf, a breeding effort the family called Project X. The industry told him it could not be done.

In November 1995, the Fuente Fuente OpusX reached the market: a Dominican puro, every leaf grown in one country, wrapped in the rosado leaf from the family's own farm. It became the flagship of the house, and the proof of Carlito's argument. Nobody calls Fuente an assembler now.

1998: the hurricane

In 1998, Hurricane Georges swept through the Chateau de la Fuente plantations. More than 19 tobacco barns and numerous crops were destroyed. After this latest ordeal, Carlos Sr.'s morale finally faltered, and for the first time in his life he thought it might be time to give up the dream. His son reminded him of everything the family had sacrificed to get that far, and gave him the strength to start again. Together they rebuilt, and made improvements as they went.

2011 and 2023: the warehouses

On August 25, 2011, fire burned down two large tobacco warehouses of Tabacalera A. Fuente y Cia. in Villa Gonzalez, near the company's main offices in Santiago, completely destroying large inventories of aged tobacco. The company absorbed the loss and rebuilt the stocks. In 2012 the brand marked its 100th anniversary.

Then the hailstorm of May 2022 at the Chateau, which destroyed a significant part of the crop. Then Warehouse #3 in May 2023. Carlos Fuente Sr. died on August 5, 2016, in Tampa, at the age of 81, but the pattern he set never changed: every profit back into tobacco, and when disaster comes, rebuild. The family now rolls more than 30 million cigars a year, and the fourth generation works with the same rule Carlos Sr. stated decades ago, doing things the way they should be done, without haste or carelessness.

There is a paradox at the center of the house. Aged tobacco is the most important thing a cigar company can own, and it is also the most flammable asset in the business, stacked in wooden barns in the Caribbean. Fuente has learned, five times over, how to start again. The fires did not make the company. The rebuilding did.