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| CIGARS ARE A FAMILY AFFAIR |
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Page 1 of 2  First ProCigar Festival ends with a bang in SantiagoLos Angeles, March 10 – Spend any time around cigar makers and you’ll hear over and over again about the “family” aspect of cigar making and how important their employees are. On the final day of the inaugural ProCigar Festival in and around Santiago, Dominican Republic, just how far a company will go to take care of its family was demonstrated by General Cigar President Daniel Nunez (pictured). His tour of the company’s 1,200-acre farm in Mao, about an hour and a half west of Santiago was full of information about tobacco, but just as much about how dedicated the company is to taking care of its 4,000 employees in the Dominican, many of whom work on their two farms. Although dedicated to growing and harvesting tobacco, the General Cigar farms also grow corn, avocados, beans, bananas, plantains, cucumbers, onions, sugar cane, tomatoes, oranges and a lot more. There are 6,000 chickens yielding 4,000 eggs a week, plus 300 goats, 300 chickens and more. And none of it goes to the open market. Instead, it’s sold to the farm workers at half of its market value, or about 2% over cost. General also covers the costs of five schools (servicing 4,000 children) it has adopted in the farm areas and during the sixth-month growing and curing season, feeds its farm staff three meals a day and provides recreational fields: softball for the Dominican workers and soccer for the Haitian workers. It’s a remarkable demonstration of corporate responsibility in a poor area of a developing country, not required by the Dominican government. Further, Nunez – a trained agronomist who graduated from Texas A&M – has undertaken reforestation projects to zero-out the company’s use of about 800,000 board feet of lumber for cigar boxes. General is now planting mahogany and cedar trees that are in their infancy now, but are being groomed to mature in 15-20 years. It’s all part of trying to organize and expand its tobacco operations in a land which is yielding better and better leaf for filler, binders and wrappers. Nunez noted that General has been growing wrapper in the Dominican Republic since 1974, but only candela-shade leaf for its natural leaf-wrapped machine-made lines such as Garcia y Vega. Beginning in 2007, both shade-grown and sun-grown were grown on about 70 acres, but that has already been expanded to 120 acres now used for premium-cigar wrapper. The 2008 crop that was just starting the fermentation process last week is destined for cigars that will be rolled in 2011. In addition to the 1,200 acres in Mao, General has 300 acres on other farms in the country and buys tobacco from dozens of contract farmers who plant another 9,000 acres. Most of the leaf grown in Mao is Piloto Cubano and some is Vega Especial, a specially-engineered cross between the Corojo and Connecticut types. When the leaf finally shows up at the General Cigar Dominicana factory in the free-trade zone in Santiago, it’s treated with an amazing amount of care in a clean, meticulously-kept factory. Between the main premium-cigar factory (opened in 1975) of 110,000 sq. ft., the nearby El Credito factory of about 80,000 sq. ft. and the tobacco warehouses and machine-made cigar factory, General runs about 10 different facilities comprising about a half-million square feet in and around Santiago. Between, they have capacity for about 48 million hand-made cigars a year, plus another 40 million machine-made cigars. |
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Did you know?
“At the time of nationalization of the cigar trade in Cuba, there were reported to be as many as 960 brand trademarks!
