Tabacalera A. Fuente opened with just seven employees.
Within a stable political climate, the Fuentes slowly
began to rebuild. Working 18-hour days soon paid off as
Carlos and Carlito gradually saw increasing sales. Then,
in 1983, the company introduced the Arturo Fuente
Hemingway in the Perfecto shape, a style that was once
extremely popular but had since faded into obscurity.
Carlito loved the idea of keeping the past alive and
convinced his father to scour their Ybor City warehouse
for molds to use on this type of cigar. It was fortunate
that Carlos had been taught to roll these special smokes
(once called “Fancy Tails” by Arturo) because none of the
modern
torcedores
knew how. He trained
his master roller, who then educated the
rest of the team. Due to its unique status as
one of the only shaped cigars on the market,
the Hemingway was a hit. Of course, this
brought some well-deserved attention to the
Fuente family.
In 1986, Carlito wanted to do something
special for his father. Using a Cameroon
wrapper, the family launched the Don
Carlos, primarily in the European market
but eventually everywhere after it became
recognized as one of the !nest Fuente cigars.
At the same time, Carlos hoped to expand
sales while simultaneously lowering costs.
His brother Arturo Oscar was in Tampa,
where the machine made operation was
becoming too much. Carlos approached
longtime colleague Stanford Newman to
request that the J.C. Newman Cigar Company
manufacture the Fuentes’ machine made
smokes. Stanford agreed and then asked if
the Fuentes could, in turn, make handrolled
premium cigars for J.C. Newman. “In 1990,
Carlos and I expanded our relationship,”
the late Stanford Newman once said. “He’d
continue to make our handmades and we’d
sell and distribute his Fuente and Montesino
cigars. At that time, he only used brokers and
we had a large-selling organization, so we
got together and started distributing Arturo
Fuente.” Since then, the families’ bond has
grown, and the Newmans now represent
Fuente all over the world.
By 1992, Carlos’s daughter Cynthia,
who’d carried a dual major of marketing and
business at the University of South Florida,
joined her family in Santiago to help with
administration. Her timing was perfect; the Cigar Boom
was just beginning and the Fuentes found that they
couldn’t keep up with demand. To complicate things
further, new factories were springing up in Santiago…
and stealing rollers from Fuente.
Throughout this very hectic time, something chewed
away at Carlito—the fact that there was no wrapper leaf
being grown in the Dominican Republic. He vowed to
change that and, by 1993, experiments were begun on the
farm that would eventually become Chateau de la Fuente.
The !rst crop was a good-looking sun-grown Piloto
A Century of
Fuente
The Fuentes purchase the four-story Charles the Great
operation in Ybor City.
The Fuente family creates the 8-5-8, named in honor of
Arturo, who passed away at the age of 85.
1960s
1970s
In the mid-’60s, Arturo Fuente purchased his family’s first “real” factory: the
Ybor City building that formerly housed the Charles the Great cigar operation.
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