• U.S.

Business & Finance: Cigar Celebration

5 minute read
TIME

Cuba sent a gunboat, a naval training ship and the presidential yacht. The U. S. landed the officers and crews of three Coast Guard cutters and the destroyer Taylor. The foreign quarter at Ybor City was a bedlam of screeching Latins. Twenty-five thousand civilians, gesticulating madly swarmed out to a vast public enclosure of pavilions illuminated all night with blue & red electric lights. Thus last week did Tampa begin celebrating the golden jubilee of its cigar industry.

The hot Spanish festival lasted four days. Pedro Mendieta, nephew of Cuba’s President, elbowed his way through the brightly-costumed crowds to the pavilions where Tampa’s four Latin nightclubs put on shows until 3 in the morning. In a public wedding one Carl H. Burg, dressed as a Spanish caballero, was married to one Margaret E. Clark, clad in a wedding gown of tobacco leaves. A Cuban girl named Pilar Farfante and a man named Manuel Perez won the cigarmaking contest, she rolling her two cigars in 4 min. 35 4/5 sec., he in 2/5 sec. less. The decks were cleared for Dancer Nicki Leoni, who appeared in a disappointingly simple evening gown of native design. As the music grew faster and the dance grew hotter, she stripped off her dress bit by bit, finally emerged in a skirt and brassière of tobacco leaves—about enough to make six cigars (see cut). Later Governor Sholtz of Florida, Mayor Chancey of Tampa and many another bigwig attended a banquet in honor of a few feeble old cigarmakers who still remembered Señor Don Gavino Gutierrez.

Tampa dates the birth of its cigar industry from 1885 when Señor Gutierrez arrived in Florida to open a guava jelly, paste and preserve business but decided to back two cigar factories instead. Today by reason of its proximity to the source of tobacco supply in Cuba, Florida manufactures about 10% of all cigars smoked in the U. S. Tampa boasts 146 factories producing $20,000,000 worth of cigars, including such well-known brands as Admiration, Perfecto Garcia, Bering, Optimo, Garcia y Vega. But the biggest cigar manufacturing centre is Pennsylvania which profited most from swift dramatic events in the cigar industry of the last decade.

The revolution was launched by one Rufus Lenois Patterson, seventh son of an impoverished North Carolina lawyer-planter. About 1919, after 20 years of grief, he perfected a cigar machine which cut, rolled and wrapped the leaves, made the cheap cigar profitable to produce. In 1921 about 30% of the 6,726,000,000 cigars consumed sold at 5¢ or less. In 1933, the proportion had jumped to 85%. This stupendous gain was made in spite of the fact that cigarets and Depression had cut total cigar consumption to new lows. Nickel cigars had simply profited at the expense of higher-priced brands.

Loudest and vulgarest leader of the nickel revolution was Cremo, the cigar which George Washington Hill’s American Cigar Co. launched in 1929 with the “spit” campaign. Today the fastest-selling nickel cigars are Bayuk Phillies with White Owl second. The rapid growth of nickel cigars quickly concentrated the business in the hands of fewer & fewer companies until by 1930 50% of all cigars were sold by ten companies, of which the two biggest are General Cigar (White Owl, William Penn, Robert Burns, Van Dyck) and Bayuk Cigars (Bayuk Phillies, Havana, Ribbon, Prince Hamlet, Mapacuba).

Meanwhile, in the small family of high-priced Havana cigars, something big was also happening. In 1932 mellow old aristocrats like Romeo y Julieta, Ramon Allones, Partagas, Por Larranaga, which had always been made in Cuba for a fairly steady U. S. clientele of clubmen and connoisseurs, suddenly learned that their most potent rival, La Corona, had moved from Cuba to Trenton, N. J. (TIME, July 18, 1932). George Washington Hill, whose American Cigar controls La Corona, had become exasperated with the cost and irregularity of labor in Cuba. By substituting Trenton girls for Cuban workmen, and by having to pay only 10% import duty on cured leaf instead of nearly 100% on finished cigars, he was able to cut the price of Corona from 60¢ apiece to 3 for $1. Corona’s competitors jeered that the king of cigars, if rolled in Trenton, would no longer taste the same. But apparently Corona has not suffered. Its new price scale contributed to a recent reduction in the prices of many imported brands.

As Depression rolls into its sixth year, the outlook for cigars is not bright. Consumption fell from 6,551,000,000 in 1929 to 4,344,000,000 in 1933, lowest in more than 20 years. While cigaret sales were breaking into a new high last year (TIME, Jan. 21) cigars were able to show an advance of only 5%. Nickel cigars continued to increase their proportion of the business. But even the future for nickel smokes is seriously clouded by the tobacco processing tax and AAA crop reductions which threaten to raise the cost of domestic tobacco used in machine-rolled 5¢ cigars.

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