Five distributors, chosen by Fidel Castro himself, monopolize the world market. They organize auctions with the promise of sending the money to the dilapidated Public Health system of the Island.
14ymedio, Xavier Carbonell, Salamanca, 4 August 2024 — Escorted by two British red coats and surrounded by millionaires from all over the world, the managers of the Hunters & Frankau house had some news: last month during the cigar auction to promote the Trinidad Cabildos, whose organization had been invited by the Havana regime, 5,150,000 euros were collected in a single night. The president of the cigar company, Jemma Freeman, promised to send the money – most would be missing – to the dilapidated “Cuban Public Health system.”
Hunters & Frankau, the exclusive distributor of the Cuban monopoly Habanos S.A. in the United Kingdom, thus closed the first face-to-face edition of World Cigar Days. Similar – but much more luxurious – at the Cigar Festival of Cuba, the event was hosted by the Victoria & Albert Museum in London. Between Rafael’s Renaissance canvases and a humidor signed by Fidel Castro in 2002 – which was not for sale – the aficionados bid on limited editions and numbered boxes of Trinidad, a brand that turns 55 and is “loaded with symbolism” for being the favorite of the Cuban dictator.
It is enough to explore the official website of Habanos S.A. to verify that premium cigars continue to give great benefits to the regime. The news section attests to the luxurious network of Cuban cigars internationally and its distribution partners. From Russia to Beirut, from Madrid to Geneva, from Havana to Qatar, the “friends of the cigar” network has been consolidating its power with millionaire sales for decades. A Cuban tobacco planter would need a lot of mental effort to process that a single cigar made by his hands is auctioned for thousands of dollars in the great capitals of the world.
Habanos S.A. would be nothing without Spain. The ethnologist Fernando Ortiz wrote that whoever rules in Cuba rules over the cigar. That phrase is illustrated like no one else by Luis Sánchez-Harguindey, co-president of the monopoly since 2012, although on his social networks he describes himself simply as a president and an expert in “international business management.”
Premium cigars continue to give great benefits to the regime
It is Sánchez-Harguindey who calls the shots for Habanos S.A. and who presents his results annually during the Cuban Cigar Festival. His counterpart in Spain is Fernando Domínguez, president of Tabacalera S.A., which distributes Cuban cigars to every tobacconist in Spain. Sánchez-Harguindey and Domínguez’s dream was to take the American market by storm, but Cuban cigars were banished. In 2015, in the midst of the thaw in diplomatic relations between Havana and Washington, both businessmen salivated over a commercial opportunity that never came.
Habanos S.A. soo
