The long and winding road snaking from Managua to Esteli would be perfect for breaking in a shiny vehicle with some major-league horsepower under the hood.

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From the Abyss

Despite Nicaragua’s war-torn history, none of the cigar makers around Esteli expresses doubts about the country or its stability. All of them have continued to invest in their businesses and the local infrastructure, with brick-and-concrete shells of new buildings rising on their compounds. At the Carlos Toraño factory just outside of town, a new 150,000-square-foot facility will rise in a cow-filled field behind their existing buildings. By summer, the factory should be producing 40,000 cigars a day — large enough not only to produce its own cigars but also sticks for Gurkha, CAO and other brands.

Esteli, bracketed by rolling hills, was once regularly perforated by gunfire. But sit on an ancient stone stoop here in late evening, long enough to smoke a robusto, and you can watch the peaceful winding-down of a farming community — factory workers ambling home or stuffed five to a stuttering Honda, kids skittering after a soccer ball in the street, dogs and chickens nosing rubble for food. It seems far away from the years of back-and-forth battles in the 1980s. “People here got sick of that [expletive],” one gringo expatriate says over dinner at Hotel Los Arcos.

“Nicaragua has not been the safest of places to run a business,” says Jorge Padrón, whose family factory here was burned during the late ’70s; his current 375-employee facility sits a few blocks from the old site. “But over the last 17 years, it’s been fairly smooth. We provide employment and run our business. We’ve been in this country with Samoza, with the Sandinistas, and we’ve been allowed to coexist. We expect it to be the same now.” Stability enables them to continue lines such as their highly rated Millennium series, limited to 1,000 cases of 100 cigars each.

Every morning at 6 a.m., an air-raid siren wails, as groups of workers make their way back to the factories on foot, by bike, car and even (in the case of Toraño’s people) by special bus. Midday, bobbing down the city’s bouncing roads, you can find small packs of men practicing that favorite Third World pastime, sitting around being unemployed — but their numbers are far fewer than in the epic shantytowns of Managua, 90 miles south. Cigars are arguably Esteli’s most important industry, and considering that each stick passes through dozens of hands in its journey from fresh leaf to finished product, it gives thousands of people here their livelihood. Whether in Nicaragua or the Dominican Republic, cigar factories have broad similarities but are vastly different in their particulars. At Drew Estate’s factory, each two-person rolling team consists of a man and a woman, cutting and rolling at the same table; at Padrón’s facility, the men work at long tables near the back of the main room, separated from the women working closer to the front. Each factory varies in its number of quality-control inspectors peering at the pyramids of finished product. Some have radios blaring music; in others, the only sound is the clack of blades slicing through dry leaf. Toraño’s layout is much more traditional — unadorned brick rooms filled with uniformed workers — while Drew Estate embraces its self-imposed “Subculture Nicaragua” label, its walls lined with colorful spray-painted canvases — the street art that defines the brand.

Workers will often stay with a factory for years. “The majority of the people who were here 10 years ago are still here,” says Padrón, lighting up one of his famous Anniversary cigars. “We have a lot of people working for us whose kids are now working for us. And we’ve taken a lot of pride in that — not only in keeping the employee base, but having them comfortable enough to bring in their own kids.”

The cost of production here is also cheaper than in the Dominican Republic. “It’s minimal, really reasonable,” says Carlos Toraño, sipping strong coffee a few feet away from workers boxing cigars for shipment. Although he started as a grower, he became more involved in the cigar-making side of the business in 1992, first as a tobacco broker-dealer and then as a cigar maker. “At the end of the boom, we realized we wanted to do something with our own brands, our own factories, our own quality. . . . By ’97, ’98, things had changed; there was a normality.” For both the country and its cigar jefes, it was time to solidify an identity and move forward.

Even given Nicaragua’s newfound solidity, and the success of the cigar companies that have sunk roots into the land, none of the titanic international firms such as Swedish Match (owner of General Cigar) or Altadis have tried to insert themselves into the local scene — not yet, at least. As a group of visitors walk among the bustle and flow of the giant 1,000-worker factory Nick Perdomo calls il monstro, he says, “When those companies come in from the Dominican Republic, they just buy tobacco. They’re not like, ‘I’m going to rent a piece of land here.’ ”

Whatever the case, the smaller, family-run cigar companies have found a home here. Jonathan Drew started rolling cigars in a tiny storefront a few blocks from Esteli’s main square, a space inherited from Perdomo. Within a few years, Drew had expanded into a larger facility, his revenues driven by the industry’s slow but steady rebound after the cigar boom’s collapse in 1998. Today, Drew Estate’s factory rivals il monstro in size — but Steve Saka, sitting on a leather couch in a tiny office away from the main floor, doesn’t see expansion as the main goal.

“We operate as a small company, especially compared to General or Altadis; we’re nowhere near there,” he says. “Do we make more cigars than some other companies? Yes. But small, medium or large, that’s not as important as staying the same — size is not relevant.”

Postcards From the Edge > If some of Drew Estate’s short-term plans work out, Esteli may become the epicenter for something else tobacco-related: cigar tourism. Rising beside the factory are the unfinished concrete walls of future haciendas, with a view of fallow fields and a wide creek meandering down from the hills. Guests will tour the factories and walk the land. For the die-hard cigar-lover, it’s the chance to see the birth of their lifestyle staple.

And when it’s time to head back to Managua, they’ll pile back into their SUV and turn right out of the factory’s massive gate. They’ll rumble down the winding dirt road, past the low brick houses with kids picking at the life-giving dirt, and bounce onto the smooth highway winding its way out of the highlands. Somewhere along the way they’ll have to shift into third gear, slam on the accelerator and pass a line of gas-guzzling behemoths — trucks filled with cigars, headed for humidors the world over.

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