Cigar Aficionado Goes to Cuba

Last week, Gordon Mott and David Savona travelled to Cuba for the third time in the past year to take a look at the up-and-coming in Cuba, as well as to travel shop-to-shop and to explore factories.  Both of these men are brilliant writers and I love reading their work, especially their blogs on CigarAficionado.com.  And both men are extremely in favor of ending the Cuban embargo, saying that its use has been outdated for quite some years now.  As there is no doubt that this is the case, I still believe that the embargo should remain in place until one key provision can be hammered out: Allow American based companies to go to Cuba, buy farms and factories, and begin creating their own Cuban cigars.

To lift the embargo now would most likely do nothing but allow a flood of Cuban cigars into the United States.  The key issue, in my mind, is the future of non-Cuban cigar companies if the embargo were to be lifted without consideration on this matter.  For example, right now all real Cuban cigars are created by the state, in state-owned factories.  Granted, a lot of the tobacco used in these factories for your favorites like Montecristo, Partagas, or Punch, come from private tobacco farm owners in Cuba, but the actual end product is purely a Cuban government owned venture.  In order to make the lifting of the embargo worth it for Americans consumers, as well as non-Cuban cigar producers, the same opportunity to create Cuban cigars would have to be given to non-government affiliated entities.  Each day, as Raul Castro relaxes more and more, he is allowing more industries to go private, but that is for Cubans.  A key part of any agreement to lift the embargo must be the Cuban government's lax attitude toward foreign investors.  Only then will American consumers truly get the best Cuban cigars because of the extreme competition this would allow.

I am clearly no foreign policy expert, nor am I some sort of economist who knows the ways of "supply and demand," but I do know common sense, and common sense tells me that without this sort of provision, quality will go down, and non-Cuban cigar companies will suffer and fold.  Cuban tobacco is arguably the best tobacco in the world, and for us Americans, it is extremely rare to come across, if we are ever able to at all.  To lift this ban, you have to level the playing field so that private companies have the same opportunities to present Cuban tobacco to America as the Cuban government does.  Only then will it truly be justified.

Mike