Quesada Cigars, formally known as MATASA, is a family-owned factory based in the Dominican Republic that specializes in the manufacture of premium cigars. It is best known brand is the Quesada, Casa Magna, Heisenberg & Fonseca line of cigars. Its current president and owner is Manuel "Manolo" Quesada, Jr.
The Quesada family has been a part of the tobacco world for over a century. When they first arrived in Cuba from Spain they were bakers. [1] It was in the late 1800s that they began their tobacco business when a debt to the family was paid with tobacco. Antero Gonzales and his brother Constantino started a leaf purchasing company, working as tobacco brokers. [1]
At the beginning of the century the brothers split ways and established separate companies and became the two largest exporters of Cuban tobacco, from Cuba to international markets. They have been competing in the world market ever since through several generations.
A daughter of Antero Gonzalez married a man named Agustin Quesada, who worked his way up the ranks and ultimately took over the brokerage. [1] These would be the parents of a boy named Manuel Quesada, who was in turn the father of Manuel Quesada, Jr. — the current head of MATASA. [1]
In 1929, in searching for new and different tobaccos, the Quesada family arrived in the Dominican Republic for the first time. [1] They discovered new tobacco strains there, which were sold profitably to European companies for the manufacture of cigars and cigarettes. [1] While some of its tobacco continued to come from the Dominican Republic, the company remained based in Havana, Cuba. [1]
The Cuban Revolution of 1960 forced the Quesada family into exile, with Manuel Sr. taking the family, including his 13-year-old son Manolo, to a new life in Santiago in the Dominican Republic. [1] Here Manuel Quesada y Gonzalez bought warehouses and established a new tobacco brokerage in 1961, called Manipuladora de Tobaco. [1] Manolo was sent to attend high school in Miami. [1]
Following completion of his high school studies, Manolo went to work in the family business, where part of his job entailed smoking the various varieties of tobacco so as to better describe them to prospective customers. This led Manolo to become interested in the art of tobacco blending and the idea of becoming a manufacturer of cigars himself. [1]
Manolo Quesada became close to a small scale customer of his family's, Juan Sosa, who worked as a cigar manufacturer in Miami, producing a brand called Antillian Cigars. [1] Due to an aging population of experienced cigar-rollers (torcedores) and an increasingly unfavorable employment tax situation, the Sosa operation was joined with Quesada's brokerage, with Quesada handling manufacturing in the Dominican Republic while Sosa remained as the American distributor of the finished product. [1]
A new company was formed by Quesada to handle the manufacture of Antillian Cigars. This new firm, Manufactura de Tabacos, S.A. (commonly known by the acronym MATASA), was established in a new free trade zone in Santiago in June 1974. [1] The company began as a small operation with "$100, a chair, and a phone," employing just three rollers. [2] Soon there were 35 rollers producing the Fonseca and Sosa brands for Antillian. [1] Total production in the first year was just 20,000 cigars. [2]
MATASA soon underwent a period of expansion, taking over the production of the Ricardo Samuel line on behalf of a major cigar wholesaler of the day, Faber, Coe & Gregg. [1] Additional rollers were hired and trained and within a few years MATASA was producing over 1 million cigars per year. [1] In addition to the products it made for others under contract, the company launched its own brand, called José Benito. [1]
Following the purchase of the non-Cuban version of the Romeo y Julieta brand by Hollco-Rohr, a contract was made with MATASA for production of the line in the Dominican Republic. [1] The cash infusion associated with this expansion enabled MATASA to open its own box factory in 1978. [1] In 1982, cigarmaker Santa Clara, Inc. contracted with MATASA for production of another 1 million cigars in its expanding Santiago operation. [1] In 1984, a further contract was obtained for the production of the Licensiados brand. [1]
MATASA continued a period of steady growth for the rest of the decade of the 1980s.
For a period of about five years beginning at the end of 1992 the United States experienced a sudden and massive growth in the popularity of premium cigars. The mad demand associated with this so-called "Cigar Boom" taxed available stocks of every necessary component and pushed production to the limit. New brands and manufacturing facilities sprung up overnight in attempt to capitalize on the faddish demand for cigars in America. Whereas prior to the boom there were approximately a dozen cigar factories in Santiago, near the end of the boom-and-bust cycle in 1997 there were more than 120. [1]
While the demand for finished cigars immediately disposed of all production, Manolo Quesada remembers the period as a trying time:
"Everybody who came [to the manufacturing in the Dominican Republic] came to take from us. We lost everything — cellophane, boxes, tobacco, bands, everything. No one was geared to supply the vast amounts of product that was being demanded.... We told them, 'Take what you want...' We would just train more rollers, protect our farms better, [and] make box factories." [1]
Prices for components skyrocketed, but MATASA carried on without dramatically increasing the price of its product. Ultimately, the Cigar Boom played itself out, with supply outstripping flagging demand and the vast majority of the fly-by-night cigarmakers who began in the early 1990s going out of business. MATASA was among those surviving the cigar bust of the late 1990s. The company suffered an additional hit towards the end of the 1990s when Romeo y Julieta ended its manufacturing relationship with the firm. [1]
In 1998, Manolo Quesada's father, Manuel Senior, who had been running the company's leaf brokerage business, died. Faced with difficulty in competing with brokerages in other parts of the Caribbean, Central and South America, the wholesaling of tobacco leaf by MATASA's sibling company, Manipuladora de Tobaccos, was gradually curtailed. [1] The company was particularly hindered by a 35% tax levied by the Dominican government upon exports. [2]
Manolo Quesada assembled a new management team around him which included general manager Julio Fajardo, Manolo's brother Alvaro, who as vice president was in charge of the company's farms and fledgling cigarette operation, [3] and his nephew Alvarito. Unfortunately, in April 2002 a plane crash took the lives of all three, leaving Manolo to run the company. [1]
Today Manolo Quesada works with two daughters — Patricia and Raquel, niece Esther and nephew Hostos.
More than 300 people work in MATASA's Santiago manufacturing facility. [3] The company produced approximately 15 million cigars in the year 2000. [3]
The company's best selling brands are Casa Magna & Quesada Cigars,best known in the medium to full bodied segment and also Fonseca (non-Cuban version), a brand best known for products in the mild-to-medium segment of the taste spectrum.
Manuel Quesada opened up his Matasa facility in 1974 with a roller, a desk, and a telephone.
A cigar is a tobacco product made to be smoked. Cigars are produced in a variety of shapes and sizes. Since the 20th century, almost all cigars are made of three distinct components: the filler, the binder leaf which holds the filler together, and a wrapper leaf, for appearance and flavor, which is often the highest quality leaf used. Often there will be a cigar band printed with the cigar manufacturer's logo. Modern cigars can come with two or more, highlighting special qualities such as age and origin of the tobaccos used.
Davidoff is a Swiss premium brand of cigars, cigarettes and smoker's accessories. The Davidoff cigarette brand has been owned by Imperial Brands after purchasing it in 2006. The non-cigarette portion of the Davidoff tobacco brand is owned by Oettinger Davidoff AG, which is based in Basel, Switzerland.
Nat Sherman is the brand name for a line of handmade cigars and "luxury cigarettes". The company, which began as a retail tobacconist, continued to operate a flagship retail shop, known as the "Nat Sherman Townhouse", located on 42nd Street, off Fifth Avenue, in New York City from 1930 to 2020. Corporate offices are now located at the foot of the George Washington Bridge in Fort Lee, New Jersey.
Cuban cigars are cigars manufactured in Cuba from tobacco grown within that island nation. Historically regarded as among the world's “finest”, they are synonymous with the island's culture and contribute nearly one quarter of the value of all exports from the country.
Cohiba is a brand for two kinds of premium cigar, one produced in Cuba for Habanos S.A., the Cuban state-owned tobacco company, and the other produced in the Dominican Republic for US-based General Cigar Company.
Montecristo is a brand of cigars and cigarettes produced separately and independently in Cuba by Habanos S.A., the national tobacco company, and in La Romana, Dominican Republic by Altadis, a subsidiary of British conglomerate Imperial Brands.
E. León Jimenes is a holding vehicle controlled by the León family with a multi-decade track record of investing in and building iconic companies in the consumer sector in Latin America. This corporation was historically involved in mainly two markets —fabrication and distribution of beverages and tobacco cultivation and manufacture of cigarettes—. The company's actual beverage portfolio includes a minority stake in Cervecería Nacional Dominicana, owner of Presidente beer, one of the top sellers in the Caribbean, in partnership withAnheuser-Busch InBev. E. León Jimenes has a diversified portfolio with investments in consumer, telecommunications, healthcare, industrials, and other sectors.
Arturo Fuente is a cigar brand founded by Arturo Fuente, Sr. in 1912 in West Tampa, Florida. Following a catastrophic fire in 1924, the brand had a production freeze for 22 years, reemerging in 1946 on a limited, local basis. Ownership was transferred to Arturo's younger son, Carlos Fuente, Sr. in 1958. Following the 1960 United States embargo of Cuba, the Fuente brand began a period of slow and steady growth, emerging as one of the most critically acclaimed makers of hand-rolled premium cigars outside of Cuba. As of 2010, the company was producing 30 million cigars per annum from its factory in the Dominican Republic.
Partagás is a brand name of cigars that are made by two independent & competing entities, one produced on the island of Cuba for Habanos SA, the Cuban state-owned tobacco company; the other, containing no Cuban tobacco, produced in the Dominican Republic for General Cigar Company, a division of Scandinavian Tobacco Group of Denmark.
Por Larrañaga is the name of a cigar brand produced in Cuba for Habanos S.A., the Cuban state-owned tobacco company, as well as a non-Cuban line of cigars produced in the Dominican Republic and Honduras for Altadis, a subsidiary of Imperial Brands. Por Larrañaga cigars have been in continuous production in Cuba since 1834.
Don José "Pepin" Garcia is the CEO of El Rey de los Habanos, Inc, a cigar company in Miami, also known as My Father Cigars. He is a noted cigar maker living in Miami, Florida. Born in Cuba, he is a master cigar roller and blender, and the creator and maker of numerous popular cigar brands.
Ernesto Padilla is a Cuban-American artist, graphic designer and cigar maker. He is the son of Cuban poet, Heberto Padilla.
Tamboril is a municipality (municipio) of the Santiago province in the Dominican Republic. Tamboril is situated in the northeast part of the province, at the foot of the Cordillera Septentrional mountains, at 230 meters above sea level. The municipality has an area of 71.4 km²; it borders Puerto Plata Province (North), Licey (South), Espaillat Province (East), and Santiago (West).
Oliva Cigar Co. is the manufacturer of several brands of cigars primarily grown and produced in Nicaragua and sold internationally. Melanio Oliva began growing tobacco in Pinar del Río, Cuba, in 1886. In 1964, in the aftermath of the 1959 Cuban Revolution, Melanio's grandson Gilberto Oliva emigrated with his family to Spain before eventually moving to Nicaragua and re-entering the tobacco business. In 1995, Gilberto and his son, Gilberto Jr., launched the Gilberto Oliva brand, which became Oliva Cigar Co. The company is currently based in Miami Lakes, Florida.
Perdomo is a brand of cigars primarily grown and produced in Nicaragua and sold worldwide by Tabacalera Perdomo. Manufactured by Perdomo Cigars, the company is a family owned and operated business headquartered in Miami Lakes, Florida and headed by CEO Nick Perdomo, Jr.
The cigar boom is the name given to the resurgence of cigar consumption in the United States during the mid-1990s. Beginning in 1992, imports and sales of premium cigars began to rise dramatically and manufacturers struggled to keep up with demand, leading to industry-wide shortages of raw materials and finished products. The period was marked and the trend accelerated with the 1992 establishment of Cigar Aficionado magazine.
General Cigar Company is the largest manufacturer of premium cigars in the world. It is a subsidiary of Scandinavian Tobacco Group with North American headquarters located in Richmond, Virginia.
Frank Anthony Llaneza was a tobacco blender and former executive of Villazon & Co. who is regarded as a pioneer in the resurgence of the premium cigar industry at the end of the 20th Century. Llaneza is best known for the creation and manufacture of a number of popular cigar brands in the years after the 1962 Cuban Embargo, including Hoyo de Monterrey, Punch, Bolivar, and Siglo.
Joya de Nicaragua, S.A., established in 1968, is the oldest brand of cigars made in Nicaragua. The company continues to manufacture its products today from its headquarters in Estelí. Today it is a major manufacturing center of handmade cigars.
Boutique Blends Cigars, formerly the Habana Cuba Cigar Company, is an American manufacturer of premium hand-rolled cigars based in Miami, Florida. The company was established in 1996 during the American cigar boom as the non-Cuban manufacturer of the historic Cuban "Oliveros" brand. The company was sold in 2002 to a new ownership group consisting of the Cuban-born Rafael Nodal, his wife Alina Cordoves Nodal, and Hank Bischoff.