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| CUBAN CIGAR PRODUCTION OK FOR NOW |
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Page 1 of 2  Plus: No more mystery about the “Ted” in Ted’s Made by HandLos Angeles, September 29 – ‘We think for at least the next year we should not have great difficulties with the supply of cigars because luckily for us, we have a reserve of raw material” That’s Habanos, S.A. vice president Manual Garcia at a business conference in Havana last week, commenting on the damage to the Cuban cigar trade in the aftermath of the stunning damage from Hurricanes Gustav and Ike. Cuba’s cigar business brings the island needed hard currency and generated $402 million in sales in 2007 (up 7 percent over 2006) for Habanos, a joint venture between the Cuban government and the Altadis subsidiary of Britain’s Imperial Tobacco. “Undoubtedly, we are going to need an important financial injection for tobacco,” said Garcia, noting the widespread destruction of the tobacco curing barns in the Pinar del Rio area due to the storms. “The damage to everything that is the growing process for tobacco in the country has still not been quantified. There is a group of leaders in the [industry] that are going all over the country to quantify the damage.” The money to rebuild the tobacco infrastructure in Cuba will come, of course, from Imperial and the worldwide distributors of Habanos. The Cuban government has said that tobacco damage from Gustav and Ike included 3,414 curing barns destroyed with another 1,590 damaged in the Pinar del Rio district and from 800-1,000 tons of cigar tobacco rendered unusable. The Cubans have pointed out that this is not the first time that such disasters have hit the island and the tobacco infrastructure. Hurricanes Isidore and Lili pounded Cuba in 2002 and were reported to have destroyed about 11,000 of the 14,000 curing barns then standing. Production was only slightly disrupted and was back to full capacity within a little more than a year. Smoking will be permitted again in Kansas City smokeshops The smoking approved by voters last April in the city of Kansas City was so extensive that it eliminated smoking in all indoor businesses, including smokeshops. That has been changed. Thanks to considerable activism by area smokeshops, especially Kendall Culbertson and his Outlaw Cigar Company, the Kansas City Council approved a change in the ordinance last Thursday that allows smoking in a “Business establishment where more than eighty percent (80%) of the volume of trade or business carries is that of the blending of tobaccos, or the sale of tobaccos, pipes, cigars or smokers’ sundries and smoking-related paraphernalia . . .” The 13-member Council approved the exemption by a 10-1 margin, just enough to meet the nine-vote requirement for an ordinance amendment where the underlying law had been in effect for less than a year. Council member Ed Ford sponsored the motion, noting that there isn’t any doubt that customers would expect tobacco consumption in a place which is solely devoted to selling it! |
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Did you know?
“An underrated contributor to the 1990s Cigar Boom was Paul Garmirian's 1990 classic "The Gourmet Guide to Cigars".
