Greatest Of All Time
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Arturo Fuente cigars have been around for more than a century, so it's no surprise that they're one of the best-known family cigar brands around. Handmade in the Dominican Republic, Arturo Fuente cigars offer flawless consistency and rich taste with every puff. Their blends range from mellow to full-bodied with sizes to satisfy every smoker. Treat yourself to a masterful cigar that is the result of over a century’s worth of passion, pride, and experience.
To say that the Fuente family’s hard work and perseverance over the years paid off is a vast understatement. The brand now employs more than 500 torcedores making over 30 million cigars a year from the factory's location in Santiago. Carlos Fuente and son, Carlos Jr., are celebrities among the cigar world, overseeing every step of the creation process of the cigars that bear their name. Learn more about their journey below.
Quite possibly the most famous name in modern cigars, Arturo Fuente's story began in 1912, when Cuban expatriate Arturo Fuente Sr. opened a shop in West Tampa, Florida. The first Arturo Fuente cigars were made using fine tobaccos imported from nearby Cuba, and carefully rolled by a modest team from Ybor City.
By 1924 the A. Fuente brand was incorporated and had expanded to employ 500 workers. Unfortunately, Arturo Sr.’s success was abruptly halted when a devastating fire destroyed the factory. Production of Arturo Fuente cigars would not resume for another 22 years.
In 1946, after the poor economic climates of World War II and the Great Depression had abated, Fuente finally found himself in a position to resurrect his cigar brand. He began by adding a few rolling tables to the 160-square-foot back porch of his Ybor City home. It was from this location that he, with the help of his wife and children, began to re-establish Arturo Fuente cigars in Tampa. By the mid-1950s he had expanded operations significantly, having established distributors in Miami and Manhattan.
Arturo sold the business in 1958 to his son Carlos, who soon seized the opportunity to introduce cigar smokers to cigars that were legal in the U.S. following the Cuban Embargo in 1962. The cigars Carlos produced during this period were blended using leaves from Puerto Rico and Colombia in efforts to create cigars that would appeal to smokers who had developed a taste for Habanos.
Increasing labor costs and a shortage of skilled cigar rollers in Florida eventually led Carlos to move operations out of the country. After unsuccessful attempts to establish factories in Mexico and Puerto Rico, he finally moved production to Estelí, Nicaragua in the 1970s. Unbelievably, the company was once again faced with tragedy when the Nicaraguan Fuente factory was burned to the ground by rioters during the Nicaraguan Revolution in 1979.
Scrambling for resources and forced again to begin anew, Carlos opened the 12,000-square-foot Tabacalera A. Fuente factory in Santiago, Dominican Republic in September of 1980.
The new, Dominican-based Arturo Fuente Cigars saw its first major success in the mid 1980s with the launch of the medium-bodied Hemingway line, a collection that introduced modern smokers to the classic Cuban Perfecto cigar shape. By the end of the 1980s the company had begun to grow its own tobacco on a large scale for the first time, and eventually progressed to growing their own wrapper leaves.
