Padrón: Three Generations

The symbol of Padrón Cigars is a small hammer. It is stamped on boxes and bands, and it refers to the tool a friend lent José Orlando Padrón in Miami in the early 1960s. The hammer got him a carpentry job. The job saved him $600. The $600 started the company.

Three generations, one hammer, no shortcuts.

That is the short version. The long version runs through Pinar del Río, Little Havana, and Estelí, through a factory fire, three bombings, and a trade embargo. It is all on the public record.

There are no myths in it that the record will not support. That is rarer than it sounds in this industry, and it is part of why the name carries weight.

Pinar del Río

Damaso Padrón came to Cuba from the Canary Islands in the mid-1800s, a boy put to work in the tobacco fields. The family saved enough to buy a small farm in Pinar del Río, then more farms, then a factory in the town of Piloto. The company's formal name, Piloto Cigars Inc., comes from that factory.

The family worked tobacco in Cuba for a century before the Revolution: field hands, then farm owners, then factory owners. By the time José Orlando was born, the Padróns had been in the leaf for three generations.

José Orlando Padrón was born in Cuba on June 10, 1926, and grew up near Pinar del Río. In 1961, after the family farm was nationalized, he left Cuba for Spain, then New York, then Miami, carrying a century of tobacco knowledge.

The $600 start

In Miami in the early 1960s, José lived on $60 a month in Cuban refugee aid. A friend asked if he had carpentry skills, and handed him a small hammer. The work done with that hammer saved him $600. On September 8, 1964, in Little Havana, he started rolling cigars.

Early production ran about 200 cigars a day with a single torcedor. His first creation was the Fuma, made entirely of Connecticut broadleaf, its curly head cap recalling the traditional Cuban cigars of his youth.

The first Fumas sold for pennies in Miami's cafeterias, where Cuban exiles smoked and talked. It was a start, not a statement.

Nicaragua

Connecticut leaf demanded a long curing cycle, and a representative of a Nicaraguan tobacco company invited José to inspect his country's leaf. In Nicaragua's Jalapa valley he found what he was looking for. He began using Nicaraguan tobacco in 1967. In 1970 he moved the company to Estelí and founded Tabacos Cubanica.

The years that followed read like a casualty list. The factory burned during the civil war in 1978 and was rebuilt the next year, with a second factory opened across the border in Honduras. The company's Miami facilities were bombed three times between 1979 and 1983.

Then came the American embargo on Nicaragua in 1985. In the five days before it took effect, Padrón moved production to Honduras and as much tobacco and finished cigars as possible to Tampa, winning a six-month extension to finish the job. When the embargo lifted in 1990, the company returned to Nicaragua, where it remains.

The anniversaries

The product line reads as a family timeline. The 1964 Anniversary Series arrived in 1994 for the company's thirtieth anniversary: all Nicaraguan tobacco, natural and maduro wrappers, box-pressed, each cigar carrying its own six-digit serial number.

The Serie 1926 followed in 2002, named for José's birth year and his seventy-fifth birthday. Its tobacco is aged no less than five years. Like the 1964, it is box-pressed and banded against counterfeiting.

The Family Reserve came in the late 2000s: six blends marking company dates, the 44, 45, 46, and 50 Years, plus the 85 Years for José's birthday. Its tobacco is aged a minimum of ten years. Beneath them sits the classic thousand series, sun-grown Nicaraguan habano aged two and a half years.

The discipline

Padrón controls every step: growing, sorting, processing, rolling, distribution. The blends are Nicaraguan tobacco, much of it grown on the company's own farms. At La Florinda, a 90-manzana farm at 1,200 meters in Estelí named for Jorge Padrón's mother, Cuban-seed tobacco grows mostly for filler.

In 2003 the company opened a new rolling center in Estelí, its seventeenth building in the city, bringing total space past 75,000 square feet, most of it tobacco storage. At the time it held leaf for more than 25 million cigars: six years of production.

The inventory is the philosophy made physical. Six years of leaf in the dark means no harvest can force the company's hand.

José Orlando tasted from waking to sleep, sometimes wrapping a cigar he was smoking in a different wrapper leaf to test it. He judged cured leaf by burying his face in it and breathing deep. If it passed, he said, "Tiene buena nariz." It has good nose.

The house

Jorge Padrón is president, working with his brother Orlando (Orly) Padrón. José Orlando Padrón died on December 5, 2017, and the company remains family owned.

The house philosophy is consistency, stated plainly. Jorge Padrón: "Our philosophy has always been that it takes years and years to build a strong loyal customer base but it only takes a few bad cigars to lose it." His father, on refusing to chase demand: "We've never fallen on the trap like other manufacturers that produce, produce and produce to respond to the growing demand, as if we were making churros."

The record backs the claim. According to Holt's history of the company, Padrón has been named Cigar Aficionado's Cigar of the Year four times and has consistently ranked among its Top 25.

Other houses chase the new. Padrón chases the same. Three generations, one hammer, no shortcuts. That is the whole story, and it is enough. It has been enough for sixty years.