A good cinco centavo cigar

I’m sure I’m not the only one who was surprised to hear Raul Castro calling for term limits. Sure, it would have even funnier if it had been Fidel himself, but F. Castro has pretty much left the building.

Raul or Fidel, it still leaves me wondering what term limits the Cuban government is looking at. No leader should hold the office supremo for more than 50 years…

Term limits is just one of the reforms that Cuba’s Communist Party is looking at.

At their recent Congress, they decided to grant a bit more autonomy to the country’s 3,000 or so state-owned business, while at the same time stepping up their auditing of said entities. I guess they’re willing to give decentralization a chance, because central control didn’t exactly work out all that well for them.

One of the main industries in Cuba is cigar making.

Cigars from Habanos, the state monopoly (which Brit company, Imperial Tobacco, has a 50% stake in, just for the record), are distributed all over the world – except for the United States where they are banned but, wink-wink, nudge-nudge, available for a price.

With or without the puffed-up, suspender-wearing Wall Street brigade – who, legal/schmegal, may account for 10 percent of Cuban cigar assumption - Cuba exports about 150 million cigars each year, with a dedicated focus on the high end.

A decade or so ago, they had doubled up on their production, but weren’t able to keep the quality high enough: smokers couldn’t draw on the cigars. Now, from my point of view, this would be a serves-you-right-type of thing. (Hah!)  But we’re not talking White Owls or Dutch Masters here. Cubans are handmade primo smokos that command about $65 retail, so one might expect that the cigars would have draw that worked with an unassisted human lung.

Habanos learned a key lesson from its abortive foray into stogie-land:

Just 10 years ago, Cubans basically considered cigars to be just another commodity to export, like sugar, coffee or nickel. Today, they have a sophisticated view of cigars not only as a unique product of the island, but also as an important symbol for Cuba that is exported around the world. "As Fidel said, the Cuban cigar is the universal Cuban ambassador in the world for us," [Manuel Garcia] says.

Hmmmmm. Their universal ambassador is a premium cigar. Our universal ambassador is probably a Hollywood sci-fi, super-hero, or shoot-em-up adventure flick. Does any country have a good one?

But you’re probably asking, just who is Manual Garcia?

We’ll be getting to him, but if you said “roving cigar ambassador” you would be correcto-mundo…

Anyway, against all this smokin’ background, Cuba’s stepped up business auditing – the Sarbanes-Oxley-ing of Cuban businesses world, as it were - is in response to a corruption scandal that Habanos has been caught up in.

It seems that Garcia, who as Habanos commercial VP and roving ambassador for over a decade, wasn’t satisfied with the perks of the job. Unlike most Cubans, who can only make their way out of the country on a leaking raft heading for Florida (while they’re being shot at), Garcia got to buzz around the world “promoting the quality and uniqueness of Cuban cigars and visiting Habanos agents and merchants.”

Garcia also became something of a household word among those who follow the wonderful world of cigars. 

Instead of just thanking his lucky stars – and lighting up a victory cigar to his very good fortune – Garcia and his cohorts were apparently running a little action on the side. He and 10 of his colleagues are in jail, cooling their heels, awaiting trial. They’re accused of diverting millions of cigars to black-market distributors, in return for bribes.

It occurs to me that it’s probably pretty darn hard to spend big bucks in Cuba without attracting some notice. On the other hand, there may not be anything in Cuba to spend it on. And with Garcia as a road warrior, out of the country 220 days a year roving and ambassadoring, he may have been able to par-tay pretty well. So it’s not surprising that his sticky-fingering eventually caught up with him. (He’s probably got a little Swiss bank account set up, for when he gets out of jail.)

But while Garcia’s in jail, I suspect he won’t be smoking any of his favorite Cohiba Corona Especials.

Good to know that, commie or capitalist, there are always going to be folks for whom enough is never enough. Close, but no cigar.

Greed as a universal good; a little larceny in everyone’s heart.

But here was someone living a life that was privileged and swank compared to 99.99% of his fellow Cubanos, and what’d he do? Went rogue, rolled his own, needed to get his greedy twitchy hands on some easy money.

Now it looks as if he may be spending a good bit more time in a Cuban prison which, I suspect, is a little more down and dirty than your average white-collar American prison.

Oh, well, at least Garcia’s not in China, where he’d probably be executed for his perfidy.

Meanwhile, for those with Cohibas on hand, smoke ‘em if you got ‘em. Just not in my presence, please.

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Quoted sections came from Cigar Aficionado, which did an October 2008 puff piece on Garcia – well before his career went up in smoke.

Info source for the corruption scandal: The Economist.