Premium Cigar-Making Is on a Roll Again in a Familiar Setting in Florida

Josephine Puerta’s hands are knotted and wrinkled. Her nails are painted a soft shade of pink that stands out sharply against the brown tobacco leaves staining her fingertips.

At 85, her fingers are too rigid to roll the leaves as quickly as they once did, and the palms of her hands have lost some of the sensitive touch that tells her exactly how much tobacco she needs for each cigar.

But she has experience on her side. Since 1928, Puerta has been rolling cigars in a city once considered the cigar-making capital of the world.

After years of decline, her handmade longfellows and fumas are more in demand today than they’ve been in decades, thanks to an unexpected resurgence in cigar smoking.

“It used to be that only old men smoked cigars, and they didn’t spend much money,” said Stanford Newman, president of the Cigar Manufacturers Assn. of Tampa.

“But now what’s happened is intelligent people, young people--I won’t call them yuppies, but young people who are affluent--started smoking cigars. And when they go into cigar stores, they want good products. So a handmade cigar has become a status symbol.”

In 1994, sales of cigars increased 9.3%, marking the industry’s first increase in the United States since 1970, according to the Cigar Assn. of America. Sales increased again about 9% in 1995.

The popularity, however, is relative. The 2.3 billion cigars sold in the United States in 1994 are a fraction of the 8 billion cigars sold in 1970. In 1964, at the height of cigars’ popularity, 9 billion were sold.

And even today, most of the sales come in the cheap cigar category: those made by machine, wrapped in paper and stuffed with a chopped tobacco filler. They sell for about a quarter each and account for more than 90% of sales.

But most of the growth has come on the premium end, cigars that sell for anywhere from $1 to more than $20 each.

Demand for those cigars has been increasing by about 40% a year since 1992, when 100 million were sold. Fifty million premium cigars were sold in 1974.

“We have people who come in here, and we just don’t have the cigars to sell them. The demand is incredible,” said Mario Garrido, part owner of Vincent & Tampa Cigar Co., a tiny cigar factory known as a buckeye (so called because they once used tobacco from Ohio, the Buckeye State). There, Puerta is among seven workers who hand-roll about 275,000 cigars annually.

The company’s cigars are sold to walk-in customers or by mail order, and the shop doesn’t advertise, except for a small ad in the telephone book that reads: Handmade cigars. Tourists welcome. Its owner, Vincent Ruilova, has been running the factory since 1943.

To keep costs low, Vincent & Tampa cigars are packaged in a simple, two-color cardboard box and often sold without a cigar band.

But the company will have to raise prices by $5 to $7 a box in 1996, Garrido said, because the demand for cigars has pushed the cost of tobacco to twice what it was just a few years ago.

In that sense, Garrido believes, buckeyes might become the victims of the cigar’s success. The demand has driven the price of tobacco so high that it is tougher for smaller operations even to get a steady supply of tobacco, which is bought quickly and in huge quantities by large factories.

“Small buckeyes like this can’t survive more than a year or two,” Garrido predicted.

And since it takes about three years from the time a tobacco leaf is grown until it is harvested, dried, rolled into a cigar and cured, industry experts predict it will be at least another few years before the supply is able to keep pace.

“There’s a critical worldwide shortage of tobacco,” said Norm Sharp, president of the Cigar Assn. of America. “That, in turn, means people can’t get enough of certain brands and certain sizes of cigars.”

Another problem for buckeyes in the United States, Garrido said, is that cigar making is literally a dying craft in the United States. Two of Vincent & Tampa’s cigar makers died recently, one at age 89 and the other at 93. Villazon & Co., which employed nine cigar makers until they died, now produces its handmade cigars in Honduras.

Younger people, unwilling to work a tedious job for minimum wage, are not filling their shoes, Garrido said.

“Very few cigar makers are left,” Puerta said with a smile, glancing up from the long wooden table where she daily makes about 500 cigars. “The ones that are left are old people like me.”

Two other cigar makers worked with her that day, both in their 80s.

“It’s all right for us old ladies, but not for young people,” said 85-year-old Bertha Palaez, who also has been making cigars since 1928. “For us, it’s all right because we’ve been doing it since we were small.”

In fact, the women’s careers span much of Tampa’s rich cigar history. One year after they started, the city’s cigar production reached a peak of 505 million cigars.

Labor unrest, automation and cigarettes later conspired to close most of the 150 factories that dotted Ybor City, a cigar-making center east of downtown that gave Tampa its reputation as a national cigar-rolling headquarters.

The first cigar rolled off a Tampa production line on April 26, 1886, at Sanchez & Hoya, one of two factories to open that year. By 1893, more than 88 million cigars were produced by factories in Ybor City.

Today, Ybor City is better known for its trendy nightclubs, art galleries and decorative arts stores than the few shops that sell premium cigars. One former factory near Vincent & Tampa now houses a microbrewery.

Ybor Square, a factory that once employed 4,000 workers--a quarter of all cigar makers in Ybor City--has been converted into a shopping plaza. There, only the Rico Tampa Co. remains among the cafes, craft stores and antique shops. One cigar maker rolls cigars before the eyes of tourists, who browse among wooden boxes of expensive cigars.

“It is dying, yes,” Palaez said softly. “But I remember the days when lots of people made cigars. Then, we used tobacco leaves to stop the bleeding when we got cut. You keep on working. You stop the bleeding and you keep on working. You’re like little machines.

“What young person should want to do this? It’s not worth it,” she said. “There is no future here.”