Conversations in Cuba
(continued)
SMOKE: How many cigars were produced in, say, 1996, and how many are predicted for the year 2000?
BASULTO: Let’s talk about general figures. In 1996, our production of cigars for exports was around 76 million. In 1999, we exported almost 150 million cigars. And for the year 2000, we are expecting to export 160 to 170 million cigars. We are adjusting our agriculture and manufacturing process to the demands of the market. We do not want to produce more than what the market demands because creating large stock affects the quality of the cigars.
SMOKE: Are you planning on introducing any new premium brands?
BASULTO: What we want to do now is start producing personalized brands from our best brands and, for that purpose, we need to be able to create a reserve of leaves.
SMOKE: When I visited the Romeo y Julieta factory yesterday, I noticed that you only age, or let the cigars sleep, for a week. Is that because of demand?
BASULTO: No, because the leaf is not really aged in the factory. We have storage warehouses for the leaves. From these storage warehouses, we ship all the factories the raw materials they need for production of the different brands being manufactured in that individual factory. After the cigar is completed, there may be a factory that does not have an area to store the cigars, but that’s not a major problem. The raw material has all the requirements of the normal aging process. What we strive to have is very well-processed raw material in the pre-industrial phase.
SMOKE: In the future, will all your cigars continue to be puros, 100% Cuban, or will you begin to blend tobaccos from other producing countries?
BASULTO: Do you think that people who produce a famous Champagne would mix their Champagne with raw material from any other part of the world? We would never do that.
SMOKE: What do you consider your top-selling brand?
BASULTO: Montecristo. The Montecristo has always been at the top position in the ranking.
SMOKE: What is Habanos doing to combat counterfeit cigars, which can certainly hurt the image of Cuban cigars?
BASULTO: What you said is completely true about the image, and Habanos S.A. is very concerned about counterfeits. We are devising a program which has several phases, including working with customs officers around the world to supply them with equipment to prove whether the cigars are authentic or not, and creating new seals and holograms for the boxes. This month, we confiscated many counterfeit cigars in Cuba, but there are many other countries that counterfeit Cuban cigars as well.
SMOKE: When you walk down the street in Old Havana and someone asks if you would like to buy some cigars, are they normally counterfeit?
BASULTO: You shouldn’t buy any of the cigars sold on the street. Let me tell you what happened to me about a week ago. A man from Barcelona sent me a letter saying that his son had been visiting Cuba, and that he had bought a box of cigars for his father because he loved Cuban cigars. When he got the cigars home, his father opened the box, smoked a cigar, and noticed that it did not taste very good. He described the box, and told us that it was a 20-cigar box. We don’t produce any boxes containing 20 cigars, so we sent one of our representatives from Spain to visit him at his home, and we learned that his son had bought the cigars on the streets of Havana. Our representatives in Spain gave the man a box of authentic cigars so he could smoke a true Cuban cigar, but I cannot send a box of free cigars to every single person that purchases counterfeit cigars on the streets.
SMOKE: Many Cuban cigars find their way into the United States. What percentage of these cigars do you think are authentic vs. counterfeit?
BASULTO: I couldn’t tell you, because all the Cuban cigars that get into the United States get there through smuggling. There are reports that say there are seven or eight million Cuban cigars being sold in the U.S. per year, but we don’t sell anything directly to the U.S., so I don’t know the exact figure.
SMOKE: When you’re talking about counterfeit cigars, I think it is also important to educate every consumer about the amount of counterfeits ...
BASULTO: My concern is certainly about education, so that consumers don’t buy anything which is not authentic. But if Americans do not want to buy any smuggled cigars, what they can do is remove the blockade, and then they can buy whatever they want. That’s the way democracies work. People get together, meet, and they make decisions.
SMOKE: Was the U.S. cigar boom a surprise to you?
BASULTO: No, it didn’t take me by surprise. And the boom in the U.S. also generated a great deal of interest in cigars in other parts of the world, because people watch what Americans do. But what that boom also brought was high production in the Dominican Republic, and with it, a restriction of that market. It also brought about large volumes of leaves from inferior producers, which eventually resulted in nobody purchasing those cigars. We have been told that over 100 factories closed down.
SMOKE: Are you making any plans for when the embargo is lifted, and when do you think it might be lifted?
BASULTO: One can not get prepared for that because it has been implemented for such a long time that you take it for granted. Our technical capacity has the potential to put cigars in that market if it is opened. Last year, we were able to manufacture 200 million cigars, and we had to adjust our plans not to overload the markets. If the U.S. market is to open soon, we have the cigars.
SMOKE - Summer 2000
HTML Copyright © 2000 by Keys Technologies and SMOKE Magazine. All rights reserved.
|
