Quesada Cigars

[1] At the beginning of the century the brothers split ways and established separate companies and became the two largest exporters of Cuban tobacco, from Cuba to international markets.

A daughter of Antero Gonzalez married a man named Agustin Quesada, who worked his way up the ranks and ultimately took over the brokerage.

[1] Here Manuel Quesada y Gonzalez bought warehouses and established a new tobacco brokerage in 1961, called Manipuladora de Tobaco.

[1] Following completion of his high school studies, Manolo went to work in the family business, where part of his job entailed smoking the various varieties of tobacco so as to better describe them to prospective customers.

[1] Due to an aging population of experienced cigar-rollers (torcedores) and an increasingly unfavorable employment tax situation, the Sosa operation was joined with Quesada's brokerage, with Quesada handling manufacturing in the Dominican Republic while Sosa remained as the American distributor of the finished product.

This new firm, Manufactura de Tabacos, S.A. (commonly known by the acronym MATASA), was established in a new free trade zone in Santiago in June 1974.

[2] MATASA soon underwent a period of expansion, taking over the production of the Ricardo Samuel line on behalf of a major cigar wholesaler of the day, Faber, Coe & Gregg.

[1] Following the purchase of the non-Cuban version of the Romeo y Julieta brand by Hollco-Rohr, a contract was made with MATASA for production of the line in the Dominican Republic.

For a period of about five years beginning at the end of 1992 the United States experienced a sudden and massive growth in the popularity of premium cigars.

No one was geared to supply the vast amounts of product that was being demanded.... We told them, 'Take what you want...' We would just train more rollers, protect our farms better, [and] make box factories.

Ultimately, the Cigar Boom played itself out, with supply outstripping flagging demand and the vast majority of the fly-by-night cigarmakers who began in the early 1990s going out of business.