Tabacalera A. Fuente y Cía. is the factory in the Dominican Republic where Arturo Fuente cigars are rolled. The farm that made Dominican wrapper famous, Chateau de la Fuente, is a drive south of Santiago and separate from the factory. Together, the factory and the farm explain how a brand from Tampa came to be associated with the Cibao valley of the Dominican Republic. The brand profile is at Arturo Fuente. This chapter covers the factory and the farm.
The free zone, 1980
Carlos Fuente Sr. and Carlos Jr. opened their business in Santiago on 4 September 1980 as Fuente LTD, after their Nicaraguan factory burned in 1978 and their Honduran factory burned in 1979. The first factory was in Santiago’s original free-trade zone, Zona Franca No. 1, an area for export manufacturing rather than a retail operation for locals or tourists. Public descriptions put that first building at about 12,000 square feet, and it grew over time. The family still regards Factory No. 1 in Santiago as its original Dominican home: the office and the place associated with Arturo Fuente, Hemingway, and OpusX cigars. Other Fuente-related production has been reported in Moca and in later buildings.
Handmade cigar production had already left Tampa. Ybor City kept the distribution business, while the rolling moved to the Dominican Republic. Santiago had become a cigar city.
On 25 August 2011, a fire in a warehouse in Villa González, near the company’s Santiago offices, destroyed a substantial stock of aged tobacco.
Chateau de la Fuente
The farm was built to prove a point. For years, the Dominican cigar industry imported its wrappers from Connecticut, Cameroon, and Ecuador and used local tobacco for filler. Carlos Jr. wanted a Dominican capa (wrapper). Attempts to grow shade wrapper had failed so often that people told him to give up. The Oliva family, tobacco growers, had land near the village of El Caribe in the hills near Bonao, and the Fuentes planted there. The family dates the first harvest to 1992. Fuente Fuente OpusX followed in 1995: a Dominican puro with wrapper from the farm.
Press reports give different figures for the farm’s size. Early stories describe a small plot and a farm of a few dozen acres; later ones describe expansion to hundreds of acres. What can be said accurately is that the farm started small, on land owned by the Olivas, and that the Fuentes bought and added land once the wrapper proved successful.
The wrapper at the Chateau is shade-grown. Growing it under tents keeps the leaf from becoming coarse. Tobacco from the farm that is not used as wrapper is not put into cheaper cigars; the farm exists mainly to supply wrapper for OpusX and a few related cigars. The binder and filler for the puro are Dominican tobacco, including tobacco from other Dominican farms. The rolling still takes place in Santiago.
What the factory makes
Tabacalera A. Fuente is a working factory, even though the Chateau, with its gazebo, can look like a museum. Hemingway figurados are one of the company’s signature cigars. The everyday Arturo Fuente lines are straight-sided parejos in the usual sizes. OpusX is the hard-to-find Dominican puro. Some other brands have also been made in Fuente factories under separate agreements.
Cigar Family Charitable Foundation
The Cigar Family Charitable Foundation is an important part of the family’s work in the Dominican Republic. It supports the local community.
For the people behind the company, see Carlos Fuente. For reviews of the cigars, start at Reviews. Smoke Rings does not sell cigars.
Santiago as a cigar city
Santiago de los Caballeros is in the Cibao, the Dominican valley that has long history of tobacco cultivation, including, at one point, tobacco for Cuban factories. After the embargo was initiated, the city attracted exiled Cuban brands as well as new ones. The free-trade zone is an industrial park, not a historic town square. The Fuentes were one of the first families there, and they still describe themselves as the longest-established family in that zone. Other Dominican cigar companies have their own factories nearby, and the country’s cigar industry is much larger than any one family.
Inside a Fuente factory you would find the usual equipment of a premium cigar factory: rolling tables, molds, an area for sorting cigars by color, and an area for boxing. Hemingway shapes need rollers who can form a point.
The farm and the factory are separate
People often photograph the Chateau because it is beautiful; its gazebos and barns make better pictures than a factory building in a free-trade zone. Those photos, however, can hide the work done in Santiago. At the farm, the wrapper leaf is harvested, cured, fermented, and graded. Then it is taken to the factory, where each bunch is still made by a person at a rolling table. The key point of this chapter is the difference between the two: Chateau de la Fuente made a Dominican puro possible, and Tabacalera A. Fuente turns that tobacco into finished cigars.
For the general rolling process, see how cigars are made. For the equivalent cigar city in Nicaragua, see Estelí.
Sources: Arturo Fuente official history (arturofuente.com); public descriptions of the Santiago free-zone factory and Chateau de la Fuente. Acreage figures omitted where sources disagree.