 Holy Smoke author Guillermo Cabrera Infante dies in London
Los Angeles, February 23 – European tobacco giant Swedish Match announced the completion of its acquisition of General Cigar and will acquire all of its remaining ownership shares over the next few weeks.
Swedish Match purchased 64 percent of General in 1999 and has had the option to purchase the remainder of the company from the Cullman family since that time. The announcement from Stockholm indicated that the transaction is expected to be completed by April 1.
Although the Cullmans will remain involved in the management of General during the transitional period through the end of 2005, the sale marks the end of an era which saw remarkable changes ushered in by Edgar Cullman and his son, Edgar, Jr. Consider:
• After buying General Cigar with a group of investors in 1961, the elder Cullman purchased the rights to a modestly-known Jamaican factory called Temple Hall in 1969, which included trademark rights to a small brand called Macanudo. Through a heavy advertising campaign begun in 1971 and a strong commitment to consistency and quality, Macanudo became the national leader among premium cigars by the end of that decade, a position it continues to enjoy today.
• In the aftermath of a series of court cases ending in 1975, General brought new versions of famed Cuban brands to the American market, including Bolivar, Canaria d’Oro, Cohiba, Partagas (first made at the Temple Hall factory in Jamaica) and Ramon Allones. Various surveys have placed General’s Dominican-made Partagas as the no. 2-selling premium cigar in the United States.
• In 1998 and 1999, General acquired two major cigar makers and a group of valuable Cuban brand trademarks (for U.S. sale only, of course) in Villazon & Co. and Ernesto Carrillo’s El Credito Cigar Company. By doing so, General gained the distribution rights for famed brand names including Bances, Hoyo de Monterrey, Punch and Sancho Panza from Villazon and La Gloria Cubana and Los Statos De Luxe from El Credito.
• Perhaps less appreciated, but just as critical to the success of General’s brands are its valuable tobacco farms covering several hundred acres in the Windsor Valley of Connecticut. Cullman’s father began planting tobacco there as early as 1906 and today this farmland is the starting point for the elegant shade-grown wrapper leaves which have been made so famous on Macanudo cigars.
• Although best known for its premium brands among cigar enthusiasts, General also owned a substantial mass-market business that featured familiar brands including Garcia y Vega, White Owl and Tiparillo. That division of the company was acquired by Swedish Match in 1999 and has operated separately ever since.
The sale also makes for an interesting commentary on the ownership and operation of cigar companies, with most of the top players in the U.S. cigar market all owned by overseas interests:
> Altadis U.S.A., owned by Altadis Group (France & Spain);
> Davidoff of Geneva, owned by Davidoff of Geneva (Switzerland);
> General Cigar, now to be fully owned by Swedish Match (Sweden).
Among the largest cigar companies still in U.S. hands are the J.C. Newman Cigar Company of Tampa, Florida and Ashton Distributors of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, both of whose major brands are made by the Tabacalera A. Fuente in Santiago, Dominican Republic. High-profile U.S. companies which both produce and market their major lines include C.A.O. of Nashville, Tennessee and four companies headquartered in the Miami area: Caribe Imported Cigars (makers of the Camacho Corojo), Padron Cigars, S.A.G. Imports (Fonseca) and the Tabacalera Perdomo.
None are close in size to Altadis or General. For 2004, sales of cigars for Swedish Match – nearly all of which came from General’s stable of handmade and machine-made brands – totaled nearly $462 million with solid operating profits of $67.9 million (nearly 15%). That’s a lot of cigars.
Service to the memory of Guillermo Cabrera Infante:
Cuban-born author Guillermo Cabrera Infante, whose favorite work was his English-language salute to cigars called Holy Smoke, died in London on Monday. He was 75.
His family was deeply involved in the Cuban Revolution and Cabrera became editor of the magazine Revolucion after the overthrow of Fulgencio Bautista in 1959. He tangled with the Castro government soon after, however and left Cuba to be its cultural attache in Belgium in 1962. After attending his mother’s funeral in Cuba in 1965, he left the country, never to return, eventually settling in London in 1966.
His greatest fame came in 1967, when his ode to pre-Castro nightlife in Havana, Tres Tristes Tigres, (Three Trapped Tigers) led to his award of the Miguel de Cervantes prize for literature, considered to be the highest honor in the Spanish-language literary field. In an interview following the award, he noted “Its success surprised me. It is half-written in Cuban slang; most readers won’t understand it.”
Cabrera’s Holy Smoke, completed in 1985, isn’t easy to follow, either. Its stream of consciousness style startles the reader, who is then amazed by the author’s unique insights and revelations tucked into the middle of an otherwise irrelevant story. For example:
“When the veins run around the cigar to be on the right side of the smoker, you have a derecho or right-handed cigar. If the opposite is the case then the cigar is called zurdo or left-handed. The legend goes in the Cuban west, Vuelta Abajo, that left-handed cigars are quickest on the draw. If a cigar is wrongly wrapped, the veins on the leaf would wind around the cigar like a barber pole! These cigars were teasingly called in the Havana of yesteryear Venetians. Some jokers insisted on putting them in a box the shape of a gondola. Obviously these clowns were working for Punch cigars.”
His second wife, Miriam, was with him at the end and the reported cause of death was septicaemia. Cabrera is also survived by two daughters by his first wife, and of course by his writings, a gift for his times and for many years into the future.
~ Rich Perelman
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