TORAÑO, JR.: It was my great-grandfather who started in this business, so with him, my grandfather, father, and now myself, it’s four generations. I’ve got a son who’s four years old; hopefully one day he’ll be the fifth.

SMOKE: What can you tell us about your great-grandfather, Santiago?

TORAÑO, JR: We actually know very little about him: he was born in Spain, then when he went to Cuba, he began brokering tobacco.

TORAÑO, SR.: He arrived in Cuba when he was about 17 or 18. He was the oldest of four brothers, and was the first one who went to Cuba. I know for the first couple of years, he was not making a living only in the tobacco business. He was everything you could think of - a farmer, a bread maker, a cook, everything. Then, somewhere around 1916 and the early 1920s, he started buying and reselling tobacco leaf.

SMOKE: How did Castro’s rise to power and the political situation affect your family’s business in Cuba?

TORAÑO, SR.: It is very interesting, because all of the Toraño family members were involved in the tobacco business in Cuba. We were probably one of the largest families working in the growing end of the industry, plus we were also related to many of the manufacturers. For example, when you think of the Cuban H. Upmann cigar, you think of Benji Menendez. Actually his full name is Benji Menendez A Toraño. Ramon Cifuentes of Partagas was married to my mother’s sister. And he lived right next to us, just like the Menendezes did. We all lived less than a mile from each other, and we would get together all the time. By 1959, the Toraño family that descended from my grandfather must have had 20 family members, running over 40 farms - that’s thousands of acres growing tobacco. When Fidel came into power, all of these people left Cuba in 1959, 1960. Now you can find a Toraño working in almost any country that has any history of tobacco in Central and South America. Some went to Jamaica, some went to the Dominican Republic, some went to Brazil, some went to Mexico, some went to Costa Rica, some went to Honduras, and some went to work for General Cigar in Connecticut. This is simply what the Toraños have always done. This was their passion, their work, their history. We’ve always been in tobacco.

SMOKE: What led your father, Carlos Senior, to the Dominican Republic?

TORAÑO, SR.: My father left Cuba and went to work for General Cigar in 1964. However, like all of the Toraños, he was used to working for himself. So in 1967, my father got the opportunity to work in the Dominican Republic, in conjunction with the government’s Institute of Tobacco. At that time, the person who was heading it up was Hipolito Mejia, who is actually the president of the Dominican Republic right now. He is a man who is very much in love with tobacco - very much a part, along with my father, in what we know today as the Miracle of the Dominican Republic in tobacco.

TORAÑO, JR.: I can’t tell you how many countries my grandfather traveled to, but I know that he really felt that the Dominican Republic had climate and soil conditions similar enough to Cuba that they could produce substantially good tobacco in that region. I think what led him there was the similarities that he found on the growing side, and the potential that he saw to convert the farmers there from what they were growing to growing Cuban seed. He persuaded them that they could make more money growing this tobacco. Up until that time, at least in my understanding, there was not a huge tobacco-growing business in the Dominican Republic.

SMOKE: Is it correct that he was credited with introducing Piloto Cubano seed to the D.R.?

TORAÑO, SR.: He was probably the major force, though not exclusively. He might not have been the one who brought the first seed, but he was the one to make it the standard. At the time, most of the Dominican seed was being grown for cigarettes, not cigars.

TORAÑO, JR.: When he passed away, a lot was written about him and his contributions; he received a substantial amount of credit for effectively introducing and showing the viability of this tobacco leaf and the business that it created for the growers. I think it’s always difficult for just one man to receive all the credit, because certainly he didn’t do it alone. But he was a significant contributor to making tobacco-growing in the Dominican Republic a viable business.

SMOKE: What factors led to the formation of Central American Tobacco?

TORAÑO, JR.: My father went into the business with his cousins when his father died, and they continued to grow tobacco in the D.R. and a few other places under a different company name, Toraño and Company, a U.S. corporation. Central American Tobacco was created in the early 1980s, effectively to help some of their clients, namely Central American cigar factories, who didn’t have enough business. They were trying to find a way of getting those clients more cigar-producing business, so those companies and factories could ultimately buy more tobacco from their growing company. These were mostly small manufacturers in Danli or Esteli, in a time where world travel was not as easy - no e-mail, no fax machines. Since our company was based in the States, my father did a lot of travel worldwide, and he knew a lot of distributors, and he basically said, “I’m gonna bring you some clients.” He acted as a middle man and put distributors together with cigar factories. The goal was to help their businesses grow, and as an offshoot of that, obviously, my father’s tobacco-growing business grew as well.

SMOKE: Does that company still produce some private-label brands?

TORAÑO, JR.: Today, instead of playing an importer/middle man, we own and operate cigar factories in three countries: the Dominican Republic, Honduras, and Nicaragua. I believe that we, the Toraños, are the only company - as both family and corporation - that operate factories in all those countries. So, yes, a substantial part of our business today continues to be making private labels, of which we, as Central American Tobacco, buy from our own factory to re-sell to a distributor. The difference is, I’m no longer the middle man; I am the factory. However, our own labels are becoming a more substantial part of our business every year.

SMOKE: At what point did you decide to market your own cigar brands?

TORAÑO, JR.: It was around 1993 when my father came up with the idea of launching our own brand name of cigars. It was just before the boom when those brands began to take off.

SMOKE: What were some of the blends?

TORAÑO, JR.: One of the first cigars was the Carlos Toraño Dominican Selection. It had a blend of a Connecticut-seed Ecuador wrapper with a combination of Dominican Piloto Cubano filler. Then, we launched a brand called Virtuoso from Honduras, and a brand called Grand Nica from Nicaragua. At the time of the boom, we were selling a lot of cigars, and I think that we were under the mistaken impression that we were building up the brand because we were selling so many. We were spending a lot of money advertising, but it was a bit difficult to be heard over the amount of noise that was being created during the boom. When the boom ended and the dust settled, we had to really analyze the strength of our brands, and ultimately determined that we didn’t feel they were strong enough. We felt we needed to basically redirect some of the energies of the company - not start from scratch, but certainly re-focus since the initial launch of those first three brands.

SMOKE: What areas did you concentrate on after the cigar boom?

TORAÑO, JR.: Our first decision was to redirect our energies by not having so many different brands. We were not going to have a Virtuoso, a Grand Nica, a Carlos Toraño, a Nostalgia; we were going to simply focus on building our name - Carlos Toraño. That’s who we are, and that’s what we wanted to represent us: our own family name. We decided that whatever we made would be under the Carlos Toraño label, and we launched the Reserva Selecta in early 1999. It was constructed with well-aged tobacco, a beautifully blended cigar, with packaging that made a statement. We still hear from a lot of retailers who feel that our packaging on the Reserva Selecta is one of the nicest, if not the nicest, in the industry.

SMOKE: Did the success of that line encourage you to try some of your more recent releases?

TORAÑO, JR.: The Carlos Toraño Reserva Selecta was the turning point for our company, and since then, we’ve complemented that cigar with the Carlos Toraño Signature Collection, which your panelists rated a 4.7 [in SMOKE’s Summer 2001 issue]. That cigar has done extremely well; it has a Brazilian wrapper with a Nicaraguan and Dominican filler, and also what I consider to be a beautiful presentation. Just last year we launched, again to complement the Carlos Toraño portfolio, the Carlos Toraño Exodus 1959, which also rated highly. We’ve seen a substantial amount of excitement in the market for that cigar as well. The Exodus has a Habano wrapper, and a distinctive blend with Dominican, Mexican, Costa Rican, Nicaraguan, and Honduran fillers. It’s a very rich, complex, full-flavored blend, and it’s also doing extremely well. If you take a snapshot of our company today, you’d find we have a new look. We have, I believe, a superior taste and incredible packaging; and we have salesmen who work exclusively for us and represent our brands in the way that we want to be represented: as a family that is serious about this business, serious about customer service, and serious about working with the retailers. I acknowledge, frankly, to anyone who asks that our brands had a tough go after the boom ended. But, as they say, it’s not about where you are or where you were, but where you’re going.

SMOKE: It seems you were destined to survive...

TORAÑO, JR.: I’m not sure if we were destined, but I can guarantee you that we were dedicated to ensuring that we wouldn’t get swept away. One of the lessons of the boom is that you don’t make a brand overnight, and if you do, I think you also bear the risk of losing it overnight. For us right now, the philosophy is one brick at a time - one retailer, one consumer. Within the industry - the people who make cigars and grow tobacco - our family is well-known. Among consumers, we are not. My mission is to create that consumer awareness of the quality of the product, of our history, and why our history is relevant. I personally believe that most cigar smokers develop a unique bond with their cigar; they want to know there’s an actual face behind it and not just some giant corporation that owns a trademark. We have a face, we have a story, and frankly, we’re going to use it.

SMOKE: Are there any new line extensions or brands that we should be looking for later this year?

TORAÑO, JR.: We’re planning a line extension in the Exodus - namely a toro size that we’ve had a lot of people ask for. We’ll probably launch that just before the RTDA [Retail Tobacco Dealers of America] show in July. There’s also another project that at this point we’re not ready to reveal because we’re not sure when it’s going to be ready. We’ve been working on it for about nine or 10 months now, and it’ll only launch when we’re sure it’s right. Our main focus is going to be to strengthening the brands that we have.

SMOKE: How many family members are currently involved in running the company?

TORAÑO, JR.: In the immediate family, it’s my mother, my father, myself, and my sister, Carolina. All four of us are actively involved in the business. I have two first cousins who are working in our offices, who help primarily on the distribution side. We also have four salesmen, Juan Lopez, Michael Gant, Armando Lapido, and Raul Rico, who frankly feel more like my brothers than my employees.

TORAÑO, SR.: The rest of the family has stayed in the growing business. They have their own companies and are doing their own thing. But the entire Toraño family, who broke bread together for all those years, is now working on cigars.

SMOKE: Would you make cigars in Cuba again if the opportunity arose?

TORAÑO, JR.: If it “opens up” the same way as, say, the Dominican Republic, where we’ve been able to open a factory, grow tobacco, and hire our own workers able to create good cigars and export them - if it reaches a point where we can legally do that in Cuba, yes; it would be insane to ignore such a major worldwide cigar market. The big question is simply if and when that’s going to happen. Personally, I’m not as convinced as others seem to be that it’s very imminent.

SMOKE: What are your plans to increase the awareness of your brand?