Carlos Fuente Sr. Passed Away

[Lew]

One by one the men who made the post embargo premium cigar industry are leaving us. Frank Llaneza, Sanford Newman, Edgar Cullman, Anhill Oliva, Juan Bermejo, Ramon Cifuentes, Daniel Rodriguez, Estelo Padron, Simon Camacho, and now Carlos Fuente.

I guess I’ve known Carlos for close to 45 years as I may have been the first retailer outside of the heavily Spanish speaking areas of the New York Metropolitan area to sell Fuente cigars. In fact, the only other retailer I can think of from the early 70’s that handled any Fuente cigars at all back then was my friend Mark Goldman who had a shop on the corner of 5th Avenue and 22nd street.

Given the powerhouse that the Fuente brand is today it’s hard to imagine just how difficult it was back then for Carlos to just survive in business and feed his family. He would come up to New York and go from Bodega to Bodega hustling his Fuente Fumas and Brevas, short filler handmade cigars which represented possibly 90 percent of the cigars he made…. and trying like hell to break into the more profitable long filler business in stores like ours with little success.

I guess I got to know him better than most because he would stay at the Edison Hotel just a couple of blocks from our store and hang out in our shop before taking the bus uptown to call on every little grocery that conceivably handle his stuff. Things were so bad at one time that we actually had to lend Carlos $150.00 because he didn’t have enough money to check out of the hotel. And… in a conversation years later with Jorge Ortiz Alvarez, a cigar manufacturer from San Andres Mexico, I wasn’t surprised to learn that on a separate occasion Carlos had borrowed money from Jorge as well.

On one of those mornings in our shop Carlos was really distraught. He had made a horrendous deal with a guy named Charlie Seguera of C.S.&J. Cigars, a distributor in Jersey City (a heavily latino area) to distribute Fuente cigars to the entire New York area. Given the dismal economic shape Carlos was in at the time, he was now hit with a bombshell….. C.S.&J. was going bankrupt ! Carlos was going to lose all the money Charlie owed him PLUS al the inventory in Charlies warehouse…. so we agreed to buy everything in CS&J’s warehouse for cash (and I believe my friend Mark also participated in that bailout) …. but that was 40+ years ago and my memory is a little fuzzy.

Well, I’m sure I could write a short story about my up and down relationship with Carlos Sr., and the brands we had him make which included the JR Alternative ( the mainstay of his original Dominican factory) …. but let me just say that a harder worker you will never find. A better tobacco man you will never find. A guy that overcame business and dire personal adversity you will never find. The business he built is not solely the result of the cigars he made, it’s a result of the person he was, and the strength of character he possessed.