Cubans Smoking Over Cigar Dispute

A sure-fire way to anger a Cuban patriot is to question the quality of the country’s baseball players, boxers, rum or cigars.

That explains why Cubans are indignant about recent charges by European tobacco distributor Zino Davidoff that the world-famous Havana cigar has deteriorated.

“No such thing,” Roberto Yaech, commercial director of the Cuban Tobacco Enterprise, Cubatobacco, said recently. “We zealously guarantee the quality of our Havana cigars and of the Davidoff brand because we cannot afford to play lightly with our prestige.”

Well-Known in Europe

The Davidoff trademark written in gold on the Havana cigar band is known throughout Europe. But the longstanding business relations between Davidoff and the Cubans came to an end last year in an emotional dispute.

Davidoff, a Swiss businessman, has initiated legal actions in Switzerland and the Netherlands, accusing the Cubans of sending him Davidoff cigars of inferior quality, and of invading his markets with their own Davidoff cigars.

“We have never sold those cigars in his territory,” Yaech said.

Yaech acknowledges, however, the possibility that some visiting European businessmen might have taken cigars out of Cuba and sold them illegally in Davidoff’s territory, without Cuba’s knowledge.

“It is a case of contraband,” he said.

The territorial division of Western European markets was fixed in a 1983 contract. Cubatobacco sells the Davidoff brand in Britain, France and Spain. Davidoff got the rest of continental Western Europe.

Spain is Cuba’s biggest Havana cigar customer. This year Cuba expects to sell Spanish distributors about one-third of the roughly 90 million cigars it exports worldwide. Foreign sales bring Cuba about $100 million a year, more than its present hard-currency reserves.

The United States once was the biggest market but the cigars were banned when Washington imposed a trade embargo in the early 1960s.

Yaech said that under the 1983 contract, Cubatobacco is the owner of the Davidoff trademark. “It was the Havana cigar that made Davidoff famous,” he said.

Cubatobacco insists that the dispute with Davidoff be settled in British courts under the 1983 contract, saying “British courts were chosen to be arbiter because of their impartiality.”

What really irks the Cubans, however, is clearly the charge that its tobacco is not what it used to be.

Cubans are proud of their fine cigars. One advertisement shows a Havana cigar with the inscription “since 1492,” the year that Columbus set foot on the Caribbean island and saw the natives smoking bundles of rolled, greenish-brown leaves.

The Cubans admit that the color of the wrapper leaf, which comes in 55 shades, might be darker than before but says it does not determine the quality of the cigar.

Yaech said that during one periodic inspection in Europe, Cuban experts found some Davidoff cigars to be too dry because they were not being kept in rooms with sufficient humidity.

“We insisted on replacing the cigars but only if Davidoff sent us certified proof that the old cigars had been incinerated,” he said.

Cuba did replace some of the cigars but refused to replace the rest when certification of incineration was not forthcoming.

Production Reduced

The Cuban tobacco official said that rather than sell inferior cigars, Cuba cuts back production of premium ones when farms were hit with a blue mold blight some time ago.

“Our cigars are still the best in the world,” he declared, adding, “if Winston Churchill and John Kennedy were alive, they would still be enjoying the same quality Havana cigars that they were accustomed to.”

Yaech said that the Romeo and Juliet tobacco company made special cigars that Churchill smoked throughout World War II.

According to Yaech, President Kennedy got his cigars from a French distributor, and smoked them during his presidency--including the Cuban missile crisis.