Tampa, a fire, and a home business
Arturo Fuente was born in Güines, Cuba, on 18 November 1887. He moved to Key West in 1906 and to West Tampa in 1910, as part of the same Cuban and Spanish migration that built the cigar factories of Ybor City. In 1912 he founded A. Fuente & Company on Francis Street. The cigars were handmade with Cuban tobacco. According to the family, the factory employed hundreds of people by 1922. In 1924 it burned down while Arturo was in Cuba buying tobacco. The loss, together with a divorce, put the business on hold for many years. He spent years paying off debts and continued making cigars on a small scale at home.
He married Cristina Trujillo. Their sons, Arturo Oscar (born 1931) and Carlos Arturo (born 1935), learned to roll cigars as children. According to the family story, the boys had to roll fifty cigars after school before doing their homework. This was a small home operation, not a large factory.
In 1956, when Arturo reached the age to collect Social Security, Carlos bought his brother’s share for one dollar and became the sole owner of a company that still made only a few thousand cigars a year for local customers. Carlos expanded sales across Florida and then further north. He bought a two-story building in Ybor City, with the factory on the ground floor and his parents living upstairs.
Embargo, Nicaragua, Santiago
The Cuban embargo meant the company could no longer use its original Cuban tobacco. Carlos bought Cuban bales in 1962, just as the embargo was coming into force; the family says it was enough for a few years. In 1966 the company released Flor de Orlando, the first handmade Fuente cigar made without Cuban tobacco. The family then tried making cigars in Puerto Rico, Mexico, Honduras, and Nicaragua. The Nicaraguan factory grew, but it burned down in 1978 during the Sandinista revolution. A factory in Honduras burned in 1979. A small operation continued in Tampa. On 4 September 1980, Carlos and his son Carlos Jr. (known as “Carlito”) opened Fuente LTD in Santiago, Dominican Republic. Handmade production left Tampa, and the old building there was then used for distribution.
The Arturo Fuente Hemingway series, released the following year, brought figurado shapes, which the trade called “fancy tails,” back to American smokers who had mostly been buying straight-sided parejos. It showed that the factory still had rollers skilled enough to make pointed cigars, in addition to adding a new line.
A partnership with the Newman family in the 1980s, first called FANCO, then Fuente & Newman, and later renamed the Arturo Fuente Cigar Company for U.S. distribution, helped the cigars reach American shops. The cigars themselves continued to be made by the family in the Dominican Republic.
OpusX and the farm
Carlito spent years working toward a Dominican puro with a Dominican-grown wrapper, something most people in the trade believed could not be done. The family dates the first harvest at what became Chateau de la Fuente to 1992. On 18 November 1995 they released Fuente Fuente OpusX, a cigar made entirely from Dominican tobacco. The farm is south of Santiago, in the direction of Bonao and El Caribe; while the rolling operation is located at Tabacalera A. Fuente, not on the farm.
The company’s other lines include Don Carlos, Añejo, Magnum R, Hemingway, and others. They are made in the Dominican Republic. OpusX is the puro that challenged the belief that the Dominican Republic could not grow top-quality wrapper, and it’s now one of the most sought-after cigars in the world.
The family today
Carlos Fuente Sr. (1935–2016) took over a small home business and built it into a large factory in a Dominican free-trade zone. Carlos Jr. is now the public face of the company. The company is still family-owned. In 2011 a fire in Villa González destroyed tobacco warehouses, but cigar production continued. The company celebrated its hundredth anniversary in 2012 in Santiago, remembering its beginnings in Tampa.
It is a Cuban-American family business that lost access to Cuban tobacco, lost two factories in Central America, and built a Dominican factory that now represents the brand. For the factory and the farm, see Tabacalera A. Fuente. For the wider history, see Cuban vs New World.
The cigar lines
The 8-5-8 is a memorial cigar, blended in Arturo’s memory and dated 1975 in the family history. Don Carlos is named after his son. Hemingway is named after the writer and uses figurado shapes. Añejo refers to extra aging of the wrapper. Magnum R uses a sun-grown rosado wrapper. Casa Cuba and other later lines also exist.
The Newman partnership is how many American shops first came to sell the cigars. In 2018 the U.S. distribution company took the name Arturo Fuente Cigar Company; the family said the structure and operations stayed the same. That same month, Carlito announced plans for a new factory in Estelí, Nicaragua, marking a return to Nicaragua.
Sources: Arturo Fuente official family history and Carlos A. Fuente Sr. biography (arturofuente.com).