Oliva’s family has been in the tobacco business since 1934, when his grandfather Angel began brokering Cuban tobacco sales for clients in the United States. Now the Olivas run one of the largest wrapper-producing operations in the world, with properties in Nicaragua, Honduras, and - as of the early 1980s - Ecuador. Along with another third-generation, multi-national grower, the Perez family of A.S.P., they are now one of only two large growers in the country, providing wrapper leaf for a long list of great cigars - Punch, Hoyo de Moneterey, El Rey del Mundo, La Gloria Cubana, Bolivar Fuerte, and Fuente’s Ashton VSG (Virgin Sun Grown).

Fans of the Ashton VSG should be aware of another little-recognized fact pointed out by Oliva: that Ecuadorian wrapper is in fact all grown under direct sunlight. “Everything we grow in Ecuador is without shade,” he states. “No one grows under shade here. It’s the most unique environment for growing tobacco in the world - the only place I’ve been to where you can’t do shade-grown tobacco. It would come out like toilet paper.”

Describing the Ecuador sun-grown wrapper as his “best business,” Oliva believes the relative scarcity of it will continue, as the very limited tobacco farming land is not likely to increase anytime soon. “There are few places to grow, and the good tobacco land is spread out, which prohibits expansion,” he says. “Other people - boomtime guys - have tried it in areas around us and didn’t make it. This soil is full of rocks. Frankly, it’s a wonder that anything grows around here.”

The first seed planted in Ecuador was from Connecticut, though Sumatra seed has become the crop of choice for many growers. Carlos Diez, of Puros Indios, is a cigar maker who knows a bit about blending tobaccos; he describes his products as “All-Star” cigars, and the main unifying element in their multi-nation blend is their silky, Ecuadorian Sumatra wrappers. “If aged and handled properly, there is no more beautiful, oily, or tasty wrapper on the market,” Diez states. “We feel that a multi-country blend lets you utilize each tobacco’s best feature. Dominican adds strength, Brazil adds a wonderful aroma, and to us, Ecuadorian is the best-looking wrapper available.”

While Puros Indios is currently developing new strains of Ecuadorian wrapper, Diez believes the nation is still a while away from becoming the next hot manufacturing capital. “The main problem is the availability of human resources,” he says. “In the D.R., Honduras, and Nicaragua, you can find lots of skilled rollers, and train them the way you want. Now you can find some in Ecuador, but you can’t train someone to become a roller overnight, or even in three months.”

At least one company based in the U.S., however, has found Ecuador to be an ideal manufacturing base. Fuego Cubano Inc., founded in 1996 in Los Angeles by tobacco entrepreneur Alex Nehoroyan, boasts a very diversified product line, from their signature “Cigets” (flavored, cigarette-sized mini-cigars) to gourmet coffee, cookies, fruit drinks, and three varieties of hand-rolled premiums cigars, Red, Silver, and Bronze. Roger Padayo, Fuego Cubano’s director of product development sums up the pluses of basing a factory in Ecuador: “Inexpensive labor, inexpensive real estate, and a climate that ensures quality tobacco.” Based in the city of Guayaquil, the 40,000-square-foot Fuego factory helps stimulate the local economy, employing 200 rollers. While acknowledging the country’s current place in the cigar nation pecking order, Padayo confidently predicts that Ecuador’s cigar business - which had briefly boomed, then fell flat during the booming 1990s - is slowly on the rise. “Since 1990, [about 3400 acres] - only 0.1 percent of arable land - have been used for growing tobacco. And many of the smaller manufacturers that had set up shop here have gone with the end of the boom. Some of the larger ones have stayed, however. We will eventually see an all-Ecuadorian cigar in the U.S. market, and I also think we’ll see another boom in this country within five years.” Ecuador’s wrappers have quite literally found a place in the sun; it remains to be seen if the country itself will find a similar spotlight.

COSTA RICA
This lushly forested tropical nation received its name - “rich coast” - from no less a personage than Christopher Columbus, who landed here in 1502 and believed, incorrectly, that the gold pendants sported by the natives were representative of a huge, untapped horde of the precious metal on the island. These days, it is the promise of adventure rather than mineral riches that have been drawing visitors to Costa Rica from far and wide: this relatively prosperous Central American nation, sandwiched between Nicaragua and Panama, has become one of the western hemisphere’s premier destinations for the burgeoning eco-tourism industry.

Ironically, it is Costa Rica’s growing prosperity and modernization that has effectively marginalized it as a player in the cigar industry, at least as a major manufacturer. In the booming 1990s, Costa Rica was poised to join the Dominican Republic, Honduras, and its northern neighbor Nicaragua as a font of quality cigars, largely on the success of one high-profile brand: Tony Borhani’s Bahia, made in the factory of the legendary Don Douglas Pueringer.

Borhani, an Iranian living in California, came to Costa Rica in 1993 to go into the restaurant business with his wife, a Costa Rican native. Soon after, his interest in cigars led him to set up the Bahia factory in the city of San Jose. Made mostly with Dominican and Nicaraguan tobacco, and shrewdly marketed during a time of unprecedented growth in the cigar business, Bahia cigars put both Costa Rica and Borhani on the map for American cigar smokers. A few years ago, the high cost of living in that nation drove Borhani, who once described his adopted home as “absolutely beautiful... life at a slower, better pace,” to a difficult decision. He recalls, “Douglas is a perfectionist, and when you are perfectionist in this business, you run into a lot of costs labor-wise. Costa Rica is very expensive to live and to do business in now.” Pueringer agreed to open a new factory in less-developed Nicaragua, where Bahia is now produced. Borhani’s connection to Costa Rica remains, however; the Bahia Millenium line used Costa Rican binder, and Borhani plans on using what he believes to be the country’s “greatly improved” tobacco in his blends in the near future.

Another Don Douglas client, the boutique brand Bucanero, has also migrated its production from Costa Rica to Nicaragua, but has discovered a heretofore well-kept secret: the viability of Costa Rican wrapper tobacco. Bob Spoden, who co-founded Bucanero in 1996, sings the praises of both Pueringer and the country’s tobacco quality: “Costa Rica is known for its ‘micro-environmental’ conditions,” he says. “There are about 250 distinct climate conditions, and some of them support some fantastic tobaccos. What we tried to accomplish was developing a range of mild to fuller-bodied cigars that would incorporate the same wrapper with different fillers. We found that the wrapper grown in Costa Rica was very flexible; you could roll a medium-bodied cigar or a strong cigar with it and it always complemented the filler tobacco.” The experiment came to fruition with Bucanero’s trio of new pirate-themed maduro cigars launched last year, with profiles ranging from milder (El Capitan maduro), to medium-bodied (Peg Leg), to fuller-bodied (Full Sail). The exact filler blends are a closely guarded secret, but Spoden is happy to trumpet the line’s consistent element, the Costa Rican wrapper.

While Costa Rica’s future as a wrapper producer and backpacker destination seems secure, its chances of returning to a position of significance in the cigar making arena remain hazy. It is largely the influence of Nicaraguan refugees, who streamed into the country during the Sandinista conflicts of the 1980s, who have brought cigar rolling expertise to the nation - and employing the skills of these rollers carries with it a price for cigar companies. “Costa Ricans saw themselves losing jobs to the refugees,” Spoden explains. “Eventually, [the government] had to look at companies’ percentages of Costa Rican vs. Nicaraguan employees. They mandated tax penalties on companies that employed over a certain number of Nicaraguans. Costa Rica is still a wonderful country, but the taxation would have driven us out of business.”