Manuel Quesada puffs on one of his creations—a funky-looking thing called a Q D’etat—as he tells a story about the Cubans getting under his skin. It was at a dinner last year in Germany, when Cigar Journal honored him with a lifetime achievement award. Everyone rose for a standing ovation, except the people at the Cubatabaco table, the representatives of the state-run monopoly.
To be fair, the presenter had just recounted how the Quesada family had to flee the island in 1960, their business having been seized by gun-toting forces loyal to Fidel Castro. It was a decidedly uncomfortable several few seconds, ending only when an executive from another table scurried over and persuaded the Cubans to get to their feet.
“They were shamed into standing up,” Quesada says, stewing over it. “I consider myself to be a kind and peaceful man, but do not piss me off. That’s why I don’t go to Cuba. Because they will piss me off.”
He’s some 800 miles away at the moment, in his family’s hazy cigar lounge in Santiago, the colonial city in the heart of the Dominican Republic where he, his father, brother and a cousin built a new tobacco enterprise in exile. It’s a 20-minute drive from the red-brick factory that produces Quesada Cigars’ iconic hand-rolled Fonsecas, everything from short, stubby robustos to giant Churchills, most fitted with the signature red and gold band, and all sold exclusively in the U.S.
Many of them look just like the Fonsecas manufactured to this day back in Havana—parallel-universe twins marketed everywhere but the U.S., thanks to the six-decade-old trade embargo, and another reason for Quesada to, frankly, be pissed off.
He’s insulted by what he views as an uneven, inferior product and infuriated that it’s held in such high esteem around the world. Sure, Cuba’s clay-rich soil produces terrific tobacco, but the dedication to the craft of cigar rolling has evaporated under communist rule. “We have nothing to fear from that country,” he belts out in near-perfect English imbued with a hint of southern twang he picked up over the years. “There’s no pride, there’s no care.”
Ever since John F. Kennedy slapped the embargo on Cuba, the communists and the exiles have never competed against each other in the U.S. market. What will happen when they do is a favorite topic in cigar circles. America represents about a third of the $21 billion global cigar market, which Cuba would love to tap and producers like Quesada definitely do not want to lose.
There’s no telling when the sanctions might finally end. President Donald Trump has yet to officially weigh in on Cuba relations. (A pronouncement of some type is expected soon.) But ever since his predecessor Barack Obama began re-establishing ties with the island in 2014, there’s been a greater sense of urgency in the cigar world to planning for the time when wrappers tagged “Habana, Cuba” appear in U.S. shops.
“We talk about it all day long,” says Quesada, who turned 70 in April. “We will give them the fight of their life. We’re not unprepared.”
The scion of a century-old Cuban tobacco clan, he was 13 when the Castro troops stormed his father’s tobacco brokerage. Manuel Jr. fled to Miami with his mother and siblings; Manuel Sr. was forced to stay behind for a year to teach the bureaucrats his business. It happened to all the families; the communists nationalized nearly all commerce on the island where Spanish occupiers stumbled upon tobacco five centuries ago.