Coming Through Fire

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.

by Nick Kolakowski

But on a rainy winter afternoon, even this like-new SUV is forced to crawl along — stuck behind yet another exhaust-belching school bus with a village’s worth of luggage strapped to its roof. It’d be enough to make even Steve McQueen lose his cool, but Steve Saka and Marvin Samel seem relatively unperturbed as they puff away at their cigars.

“When I first started coming here 15 years ago,” says Saka, president of Drew Estate, the cigar company founded by Samel and his business partner, Jonathan Drew, in 1995, “men with AK-47s would stop people in the road.”

In light of that, who wouldn’t be happy dealing with just a little traffic?

The two-lane straightens out, and Saka takes the opportunity to throw the whining SUV into third and power around the bus. They’re approaching Esteli, a low and sprawling town in Nicaragua’s north country, considered one of the capitals of the cigar-making world. Men on horseback clop along the rough roads, sharing space with clattering trucks and rusty compacts with blaring speakers bolted to their roofs — the buildings’ bright stucco still bearing the bullet pocks of the country’s extended civil war.

Saka turns off the road a few miles from their factory on the outskirts of town. A mere aluminum shell some eight months ago, the huge facility now produces 70,000 cigars a day, including their Liga Privada and Château Real lines, both of which have become immensely popular among a younger demographic of cigar smokers. In any other town, a factory of that immensity would be remarkable but at least five major cigar makers occupy their own compounds within a 15-minute drive of the town center, producing a major portion of Nicaragua’s 55 million–plus sticks exported annually to the United States.

Esteli’s heart may be the tall white church looming over the bustle of the town square, but its soul is in the soil, rich and thick as it crumbles between your fingers. Slip a chunk in your mouth and taste the clay. It’s the reason why Nicaraguan tobacco is prized by cigar makers and smoke connoisseurs.

“This is tobacco grown near here,” says Nestor Plasencia Jr., fifth-generation scion of one of the country’s best-known cigar brands, as he offers up a handful of dry leaves from a bin deep in his factory. “Smell that? This is very strong; that means it’s heavy soil.”

The cigar tradition in Nicaragua goes back nearly 50 years. It never endured the same degree of mania that swept the Dominican Republic during the cigar boom of the mid-’90s, and its soil, rich in nutrients — thanks to omnipresent volcanic activity — hasn’t undergone the depletion that has affected other nations’ crop yields.

So cigar companies here (nobody seems quite sure how many outfits are rolling sticks, but most estimates range between 20 and 30), are in it for the long haul. Although they’ve moved their tobacco stockpiles to neighboring Honduras during periods of instability, the soil — whether in Esteli, Condega or Jalapa Valley, the prime tobacco-growing areas — is simply too good, too unique, for them to stay away. “We take tobacco from different regions so we don’t have to change the blends,” says Plasencia, handing over three of his newest creations, the Plasencia Reserva Organica, an organic-tobacco stick, meant to evoke the rustic and clean cigars of centuries past. “Right now the market is so sophisticated. . . . you have to give the customer a good cigar.”

Around him, workers start yet another day in what some have termed the “cathedral of cigars.” Narrow stained-glass windows front the building, and the greenery-filled courtyard at the center gives the enterprise an almost monastic air, as rolling tobacco from all three of the country’s prime growing areas begins.

The younger Plasencia, like his famous father, knows all too well the work required to reach this point. Living in Nicaragua over the past several decades, the Plasencias needed the strength to start over after the Sandinistas took everything in the course of the revolution. “We’d been confiscated by the government twice — first in Cuba, then here,” he says. “My father was a hard worker, and wise. And right now we’re in a good position for cigar production and tobacco growing.”

Nicaragua’s stronger tobacco has dovetailed nicely with the current trends in cigar smoking. “People are looking for more and more flavor,” says Nick Perdomo Jr., head of nearby Tabacalera Perdomo. “We’re Cuban, and even my father said the best tobacco in the world, bar none, is from Nicaragua.” For someone whose grandfather once rolled at Cuba’s famous H. Upmann factory, that constitutes a major statement of faith — one shared by his colleagues. The filler of his new Perdomo Habano combines Cuban-seed tobaccos from the Esteli, Condega and Jalapa regions.

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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.