From there, it was a roller-coaster ride for the beleaguered Upmann family. The cigar industry experienced a precarious dip in the late 19th century, and the outbreak of World War I took its toll on the fortunes of the German-born Upmanns. By 1922, they were driven out of Cuba and forced to liquidate their assets. A London-based company bought the factory, but struggled financially to keep the brand alive. Finally, the floundering company came into the very capable hands of Menendez Garcia y Cia, who’d later go on to launch the successful Montecristo brand, and the prestige of the H. Upmann name was restored to its proper place in the cigar world. Just goes to show, money can’t buy love - or cigarmaking expertise.

Montecristo
This brand’s probable namesake has had a higher profile recently, with Alexandre Dumas’s classic The Count of Montecristo being made into a big-screen epic starring Guy Pearce and Jim Caveziel. The swords and fleur-de-lis in the famous logo are almost certainly an homage to Dumas’s swashbuckling hero, but the reason for the name is still unsure. Some experts believe that it sprang from the old days in Cuba’s cigar-rolling rooms, when a “reader” would come in every day to read to the rollers to entertain them during their often tedious workday. Dumas’s tale of a man falsely imprisoned who breaks free and seeks revenge apparently was a favorite of many of the rollers - no surprise, considering their lot of toiling long hours in a hot room for low wages. Perhaps we all can identify with “the Count,” Edmond Dantes, now and then. Montecristo remains the most popular Cuban brand, and the Dominican version is a well-known favorite in the States.

Partagas
Don Jaime Partagás was a man of great ambition and passion - traits which brought the world one of its greatest premium cigar brands, but also may have brought him an untimely end.

Partagás, originally from Catalonia, established his self-named brand in 1845, setting incredibly high standards for the cigars, insisting on only the best tobacco leaves, and the most skilled torcedors to roll them. He was a pioneer in the cigarmaking business, deviating from tradition to experiment with new methods of farming, fermenting, and blending. He also put more energy into advertising than others of his time. As a result, Partagás cigars became famous for their quality, and sought the world over.

However, too much success may have sealed Jaime Partagás’ fate in 1868. As recounted in Epicur’s Guide to the Habano: “Don Jaime Partagás was a passionate man, especially when it came to feminine beauty. Owner of tobacco plantations in Vuelta Abajo, he often paid visits there to check their progress, but also to eagerly enjoy certain romances. There... he was enraptured by the voluptuousness of the smoke of his magnificent cigars and enjoyed to the full the ardent women whose skin color was so evocative of the Habano. Love, jealousy, and revenge resulted in the murder of Don Jaime, found dead one morning, under mysterious circumstances, in one of his plantations.”

Though we’ll never know the details, sordid or otherwise, of Jaime Partagás’ death, we can take comfort that his brand came into good hands - namely those of the legendary Ramon Cifuentes, whose association with the Partagas brand is second only to Jaime’s own. The Partagás factory in Cuba - the nation’s oldest continually operating factory - continues to produce Partagás cigars, although the Cifuentes family brought their cigarmaking expertise to the Dominican Republic after Castro’s nationalization of the industry. The venue changes, the passion lives on.

Por Larranaga
Yes, Virginia, there was a Larrañaga - Ignacio Larrañaga, to be precise, a Spaniard who launched this hallowed brand in 1834 (The name in Spanish, means simply, “by Larrañaga.”). It’s made in smaller production in Cuba these days, but a Dominican version is still going strong in the U.S. Por Larrañaga’s claim to fame is that it was a well-known favorite of the poet Rudyard Kipling, who mentioned it by name in his poem, “The Betrothed” - incidentally, the same poem that contains the famous line “A woman is only a woman, but a good cigar is a smoke.” Old Rudyard may not have been the most politically correct guy, but he knew a good smoke when he tried one.

Punch
Though most smokers of this cigar - in either its original Cuban or current Honduran version - could be convinced the name came from it’s legendary full-bodied kick, the story is a little different. The cigar’s creator, Don Manuel Lopez of J. Valle and Company in Havana, decided to appeal to the British market by naming the brand after the harlequin-like character of the Punch and Judy puppet shows, who was the mascot for the popular humor magazine also called Punch (A.A. Milne, creator of Winnie the Pooh, worked on its editorial staff for many years.) The Mr. Punch character still appears on the boxes to this day. The marketing gambit was successful, as Punch became one of the top-selling brands in Britain, and a favorite of another “Winnie”: Winston Churchill.

As of this year, the Punch cigar has officially outlived the publication that inspired its name: the humor mag, a British institution since 1841, ceases publication in 2002 - though its mischievous mascot lives on in its online archives, and in the humidors of many discerning cigar lovers.

Ramon Allones
If you’ve ever bought a box of cigars simply because of the pretty box design, you’ve got Ramón Allones to either thank or blame, depending on your experience with the actual cigars. Allones came from Galicia, Spain with his brother Antonio way back in 1837 to take the Cuban cigar business by storm. The cigar bearing Ramón’s name is one of the oldest existing brands, still proudly proclaiming its 1837 date of inception on the band (though the brand was not registered until 1845). Allones was an innovator, the first to use colorful, decorative design on a cigar box, and the first to institute the idea of boxes of 25, organized in the 8-9-8 packing system (eight on top, nine in the middle, eight on the bottom), with one size of cigar per box. And his efforts didn’t go unnoticed by the higher-ups in his homeland; Allones became the only cigarmaker with the official permission to display the coat of arms of the Royal House of Spain on his boxes. Ownership passed to the Cifuentes family in 1927, who kept the brand alive and unique. A Dominican Ramón Allones recently reintroduced by General Cigar continues the tradition of ornate packaging - all the way down to the 1837 on the colorful band.

Romeo y Julieta
Whether we read the Shakespeare play, saw it performed, or experienced any of the various cinematic interpretations, most of us are familiar with the story of forbidden love that inspired the name of this venerable and much-beloved brand. We’ll never know for sure if the brand’s originators, Inocencio Alvarez Rodriguez and José Manin Garcia, were pining away for an impossible love when they named their cigar back in 1875; in fact, we may never have known about the cigar itself had they not sold it to Rodriquez “Don Pepin” Hernandez in 1903. Don Pepin was a shrewd promoter who approached the marketing of the cigar with the zeal of a Hollywood super-agent. He named his own race horse Julieta. He expanded production to 20 million cigars a year, and introduced an array of shapes and sizes to please as many smokers’ tastes as possible. He was known for creating personalized cigar bands for the celebrities of the day, and the most enduring example of his influence is the cigar size we know today as the Churchill. Originally called the Clemenceau, for a French diplomat, this big cigar became a favorite of British Prime Minister Winston Churchill. Sir Winston’s love of this particular cigar led to the entire size being named after him; practically every cigar brand to this day has at least one Churchill in its portfolio.

Don Pepin died in 1954, still a much-beloved figure in the cigar world. Fortunately for cigar smokers worldwide, he reached a much riper old age - 88 - than Shakespeare’s doomed young lovers.