SMOKE: How long was your family in the tobacco business back in Cuba?

PEREZ-CARRILLO: My father was born in 1904, and he started manufacturing cigars in about 1948. Before that he was in the leaf processing business. The original owner of the factory that he bought was getting old and his family didn’t want to keep the business. That was how he got started.

SMOKE: Can you tell me a little about the circumstances under which your family left Cuba?

PEREZ-CARRILLO: At the time I left, which was in 1959, I was seven years old. My father was a Senator, and, not having the same political ideas that Castro had, he got arrested probably 10 times before he was able to leave the island and come to Miami. After he, and then my mother, left, I stayed with my aunt until I finally left in May of 1959. After a few years, luckily, we were able to get about half of the family out, but half of my family is still in Cuba.

SMOKE: You went straight from Cuba to Miami in 1959, but you didn’t open the El Credito factory in the U.S. until 1968. How did your family take care of itself before that?

PEREZ-CARRILLO: Before starting the cigar factory, my mother was a seamstress, and my father owned a bar in downtown Miami for a little while. Toward the end, before he opened the factory, he was working in a tennis shoe factory. At that time he was only making $40 a week, plus what little my mother made as a seamstress. Somehow, we were able to make ends meet; things weren’t as expensive back then as they are now. When I was 11, I had part-time jobs like repairing air conditioners. Basically the whole family worked and pulled it together to make ends meet. My father, before he started up his own cigar company, worked for another company called Tropicana Cigars. He was a supervisor there, and it must have been really degrading for him; he was always a businessman. But he had a plan of opening his own business, which he did in ‘68 when he brought the El Credito factory, which we still own now.

Perez-Carrillo in the original El Credito factory in Miami, which still rolls small quantities of La Gloria Cubanas.

SMOKE: In that factory, why did your father decide at that time to manufacture predominantly short filler cigars?

PEREZ-CARRILLO: Because that’s what was popular in Miami. There really wasn’t that large a market for long-filler cigars there. Most of those markets were outside Miami. When my father opened up the business, it was just him and one other cigar roller - who, incidentally, is still with us. At that time I was dating my wife Elena, and we would both help him out. Her mother would help him out, one of my aunts would help him out - but it was still a small, local, very family-oriented type of business when it started.

SMOKE: At what point did your father become convinced to try his hand at a long filler cigar, the original El Rico Habano?

PEREZ-CARRILLO: That was really the first brand that he came up with alone, and it’s not the same brand we have now. The reason was that we hooked up with a couple of distributors, one in Chicago named Hank Greenberg, who owned a Chicago smokeshop; and another in Philadelphia named Stanley Lieberman, of Premier Cigars. We made a deal with those two guys and started selling them bundles of El Rico Habanos.

SMOKE: Were those cigars very successful at the time?

PEREZ-CARRILLO: They did all right. It wasn’t setting the world on fire, but [my father] was able to go from having one cigar maker to having about 15.

SMOKE: Around what year was this?

PEREZ-CARRILLO: About 1974. That’s when it started becoming a little more like a business. After that, my father kept expanding little by little. He had a lot of customers in the stores, and he would go into the white pages, sending brochures, and that’s basically how he started building his mail-order business. It wasn’t very large, but for us it was good enough, and then, little by little, started growing. Unfortunately, in about 1976-77, he came down with ALS, or Lou Gehrig’s disease. I admired both him and my mother so much. For those two years that he was in bad shape, she took care of him, and because of the spirit that she had - to will him go on living as long as he could - he held on until the last minute trying to beat the illness. Unfortunately, it was just a little stronger than he was.

SMOKE: You, however, were not originally planning for a career in the cigar business, correct?

PEREZ-CARRILLO: You know how youngsters are. Originally I was planning on a career in music. I wanted to become a famous jazz musician, a drummer. And unfortunately I didn’t make it, though I did play a lot of clubs in New York.

SMOKE: Was it your father’s passing that convinced you to come in and join the family business?

PEREZ-CARRILLO: Not really, because I came down about two or three years before he passed away, when I found out he was sick. How I came into the business is a good story. One day, before anyone knew he had the disease, he called me and said, “I want you to come with me.” I didn’t know what it was about. So we went to a broker, and there were two gentlemen there from the Royal Jamaican Cigar Factory, in Jamaica. Apparently, they had offered to buy my father’s factory, and at that time they’d offered him $125,000. At that point I started to think about it: “Do I really want to be a musician, or is this what I truly love to do?” So, right in the middle of the meeting, I asked my father if we could talk outside. I think the last thing that he expected was for me to tell him that I didn’t want him to sell the business. He told me that I didn’t seem to be that interested in it. I suppose at that time he was right. I was more interested in music, and there wasn’t that much money being made in the cigar factory. But I was already working in the factory, plus a night job, to support my family. I realized that making cigars is what I love to do. My father said, “If this is what you want, I won’t sell it. But you have to put in your time and work with me.” There was a different chemistry between us from that moment on. I stuck with him - of course, I still have my music as a hobby - and I’m sure now that running the cigar factory was what I wanted to do.

SMOKE: And one of the first things you did was try something new with the blend of your father’s La Gloria Cubana brand.

PEREZ-CARRILLO: The reason that happened was because I went to an exposition of a cigar band collection, where I saw the original La Gloria Cubana band from Cuba. From that moment I started working on changing the packaging to the original one from Cuba. I started looking at different blends, because I was looking for something specific. In 1982, I smoked a Davidoff from Cuba that a coworker of mine brought back for me from England, and that blend of tobacco simply blew my mind. I said, “This is what I want to achieve with La Gloria Cubana.” I started experimenting. And it took me six years before I was able to come up with what I was looking for in that cigar. This was in about 1991… a little before the cigar boom was starting in the U.S.

SMOKE: Did you realize at the time that the consumer taste was shifting toward a more full-bodied flavor?

PEREZ-CARRILLO: I don’t make cigars or blends to please any particular group of people. I do something I like, and hopefully, whatever brand I may come up with, others are going to enjoy it also. We experimented with different types of tobacco, from Brazil, Mexico, Honduras, practically everywhere, before I finally came up with the blend that I was looking for. In fact, whether it’s from the Dominican Republic, Nicaragua, Ecuador, or wherever, it’s all from people who I’ve been buying from for years, and only from certain farms in certain areas. I think that contributes to the uniqueness of the blend, and the success of La Gloria Cubana.

SMOKE: How many cigars were you making during the boom years, and how many are you making now?

PEREZ-CARRILLO: I would say 1997 was our biggest year; by then we were in the Dominican Republic, and we made about six million cigars there. Now we’re actually making more. This year, it’s about 7.4 million.

SMOKE: Was it in 1997 that you realized you needed a new factory?

PEREZ-CARRILLO: No, actually I started looking to expand in 1995, going to the Dominican Republic and looking at different factories, and in April of 1996 we opened. That first year, between our facilities in Miami and the Dominican, we produced two million cigars. We are actually still making some La Gloria Cubanas in Miami.

SMOKE: Why was the El Rico Habano brand discontinued originally, and what made you decide to bring it back last year?

PEREZ-CARRILLO: El Rico Habano had become consistently good by 1997, but with the boom happening, after a while I couldn’t get enough good tobacco. The demand was too big, so we stopped making it. Finally, about two years ago, we reintroduced it because there’s once again a lot of good tobacco available in Nicaragua.

SMOKE: How does this blend compare to the original?

PEREZ-CARRILLO: Many people liked the old one, but to me, frankly, it was hit or miss. Now the cigar has strength, it has aroma, and it has the taste that it had at its best. There’s more consistent quality in the blend. Focusing on that blend showed me again that in the cigar business you never finish learning.

SMOKE: One of the biggest cigars out there now - in size and popularity - is La Gloria Cubana Serie R. What inspired you to do that line in the really large sizes?

PEREZ-CARRILLO: We were going to the RTDA (Retail Tobacco Dealers of America) trade show to promote La Gloria Cubana, and about 10 days before the event I realized that I was starting to see things slowing down. I knew that we had to come out with something new to revive the brand. So I decided to make two of the big sizes, No. 4 and No. 5, and called them Serie R - the “R” is for robusto, because they’re all robusto sizes. Then I went to the boxmaker and had them start work on a cabinet box. [For the box color,] we tried green, we tried light colors, we tried maple, and finally settled on the color we have now. So, actually, we did all that in about 10 days, and I brought the samples with me to RTDA. Then we came out with a No. 6, and then the No. 7, which will be the last.

SMOKE: Did you anticipate the demand for that brand?

PEREZ-CARRILLO: No, I was just making something I like, because I like those big cigars. Years before that, I had made cigars ranging from 54 to about 56 ring gauges, which were even bigger. We used to sell them to cigar connoisseurs, charging $5 or $6, which was unheard of back then. I thought maybe there would be a market for these cigars today. And to me, once you smoke one of those cigars, it just feels so natural and enjoyable. Everybody makes a big cigar now.

SMOKE: What’s the story of the El Credito International?

PEREZ-CARRILLO: That is the same blend as La Gloria Cubana, but in European sizes: smaller ring gauges, smaller cigars. We’d been selling them only in Europe but now we’ve made them available in the States as well. They have the different name in Europe because of Cuba’s issue with the La Gloria Cubana name.

SMOKE: If things changed in Cuba politically, would you ever return and make cigars there?