How Cuban exiles, volcanic earth, political power, war and thousands of working hands turned Nicaragua into one of the world’s great cigar countries.
There is something almost romantic about a tobacco field in Nicaragua.
Under the Central American sun, rows of broad green leaves stretch toward mountains in the distance. Around Estelí, the earth beneath them is dark and mineral-rich. Travel north toward Condega and Jalapa and the landscape changes. Far to the south, tobacco is even cultivated on Ometepe, the extraordinary island dominated by two volcanoes rising from Lake Nicaragua.
It is easy to look at these places and tell a simple story.
Rich soil.
Perfect climate.
Exceptional tobacco.
Great cigars.
But Nicaragua’s cigar story has never been that simple.
Behind the cigars resting today in humidors around the world is a story of refugees and dictators, American presidents and revolutionaries, burned factories and economic survival.
There is money in the story.
There is political power.
There are even mistresses, brothels, guns and whiskey lurking around its edges.
And behind all of it are thousands of Nicaraguans whose hands turn tobacco leaves into one of their country’s most celebrated exports.
To understand the Nicaraguan cigar, you have to understand something about Nicaragua.
And that story begins, strangely enough, in Cuba.
The Revolution That Planted a Seed
When Fidel Castro’s revolution transformed Cuba in 1959, it didn’t merely change a government.
It scattered generations of knowledge.
Cuban tobacco growers, blenders and cigar makers left the island and began looking throughout the Caribbean and Central America for something very particular: land capable of producing tobacco worthy of the traditions they had left behind.
Nicaragua caught their attention.
In the mid-1960s, Cuban tobacco men including Juan Francisco Bermejo began experimenting with Cuban seed in northern Nicaragua. Estelí and Condega proved particularly promising.
In 1968, Bermejo and fellow Cuban Simón Camacho founded the Nicaragua Cigar Company in Estelí.
The cigar eventually became known as Joya de Nicaragua — “Jewel of Nicaragua.”
It was Nicaragua’s first major internationally marketed cigar brand.
Joya de Nicaragua’s own history chronicles those beginnings and the extraordinary political upheaval the company would subsequently survive.
The Cuban Revolution had inadvertently helped create a competitor.
And the land was ready.
What the Volcanoes Left Behind
Cigar people use the French wine term terroir frequently, sometimes a little too romantically.
In Nicaragua, however, geography genuinely matters.
Estelí lies in Nicaragua’s northern highlands. Its brown-to-black soils developed partly from volcanic rock and contain substantial mineral content. Tobacco grown there has become particularly associated with strength and spice.
Move north and the equation changes.
Condega’s elevation, soils and climate produce tobacco with different characteristics.
Farther toward the Honduran border lies the Jalapa Valley, prized particularly for beautiful wrapper leaf and tobacco often described as sweeter and more aromatic than the heavier leaf associated with Estelí.
Then there is Ometepe.
Sitting in Lake Nicaragua beneath the volcanoes Concepción and Maderas, the island produces tobacco in an environment unlike the northern growing regions.
Four names — Estelí, Condega, Jalapa and Ometepe — can therefore appear on a cigar blender’s map almost like vineyards on a winemaker’s.
But exceptional soil alone doesn’t create an industry.
For that, Nicaragua needed politics.
And Nicaragua had plenty.
A Dictator Discovers His Country’s Cigar
This is where the story begins to sound like something written for a movie.
Except much of it happened.
Anastasio Somoza Debayle ruled Nicaragua as part of a family dynasty that had dominated the country for decades.
The Somozas controlled far more than politics. Anastasio Somoza controlled the military and accumulated extensive economic interests. U.S. historical records describe a Nicaragua in which political authority, the National Guard and economic power had become deeply intertwined.
Then the dictator discovered something interesting about the little cigar factory in Estelí.
According to Joya de Nicaragua’s account of its history, Somoza was visiting the United States and met President Richard Nixon.
Cigars were offered.
And sitting in the White House was a box bearing the bands of the Nicaragua Cigar Company.
The precise details of stories like this inevitably become polished after being retold for half a century, but the essential development is well documented: Joya de Nicaragua had become remarkably successful in the United States and was associated with the Nixon White House.
Somoza noticed.
He already had tobacco interests of his own.
Now he wanted the cigar factory.
Joya de Nicaragua’s historical account says founder Juan Francisco Bermejo sold part of the Nicaragua Cigar Company to Somoza under political pressure.
Other cigar histories are less delicate. Cigar Aficionado’s account of the birth of Nicaragua’s cigar industry describes the political pressure surrounding the company and Somoza’s involvement.
Either way, Nicaragua’s first internationally successful cigar company had attracted the attention of the country’s most powerful man.
A cigar born partly from refugees fleeing one revolution had now become entangled with a dictatorship headed toward another.
Cigars, Power and the Nightlife of a Dictatorship
The world surrounding the Somoza regime was considerably less genteel than the image of a cigar being selected at the White House.
Historical scholarship describes a political system in which Nicaragua’s National Guard and local political operators participated in an underground economy that included gambling, illegal alcohol and prostitution.
Bars and brothels could become part of networks of patronage and political loyalty.
Historian Robert J. Sierakowski explores this darker social and political landscape in Sandinistas: A Moral History, published by the University of Notre Dame Press.
This wasn’t organized crime in the Hollywood sense, and it would be irresponsible to pretend that Nicaragua’s cigar industry itself was a criminal enterprise.
But the cigar business was operating inside a political system in which the boundaries separating government, private wealth, vice and personal power could become remarkably blurry.
And Somoza himself supplied plenty of intrigue.
Although married to Hope Portocarrero, Somoza maintained a well-known relationship with Dinorah Sampson.
The relationship was public enough to appear in American diplomatic correspondence.
A fascinating piece of the historical record survives in the U.S. State Department archives: a 1974 American diplomatic cable discussing Somoza’s anger over press coverage of Dinorah Sampson.
The cable explicitly refers to Sampson as Somoza’s mistress.
It is a small detail in the history of a dictatorship.
But it reveals something about the Nicaragua in which the cigar industry was coming of age.
This wasn’t simply a story about farmers discovering good soil.
It was a world of powerful families, political patronage, wealth, nightlife, revolutionary movements and increasingly violent opposition.
Somewhere inside that world, workers in Estelí continued rolling cigars.
Then the Country Exploded
By the late 1970s, Nicaragua was approaching breaking point.
Opposition to Somoza had grown across social classes. The assassination of prominent newspaper publisher Pedro Joaquín Chamorro in January 1978 became a catalyst for mass demonstrations and escalating conflict.
The Sandinista National Liberation Front intensified its campaign.
The U.S. State Department’s historical record of Central America from 1977–1980 provides extensive documentation of Washington’s increasingly difficult relationship with Somoza and the deteriorating situation inside Nicaragua.
Estelí became one of the battlegrounds.
And cigar factories were caught in the middle.
Joya de Nicaragua’s factory was attacked and burned during the uprising.
Then came one of the strangest episodes in cigar history.
According to Joya de Nicaragua’s historical account, aircraft loyal to Somoza bombed the factory because they believed Sandinistas were using it as a base.
Think about the irony.
The dictator who had maneuvered his way into the cigar company because he recognized its prestige was now fighting so desperately to retain power that forces loyal to him attacked the same factory.
Joya wasn’t alone.
José Orlando Padrón, another Cuban exile building a cigar business in Nicaragua, watched his Estelí factory and warehouse burn during the revolutionary turmoil.
The remarkable story of the family’s experiences during this period is chronicled in The Padrón Family: A Nicaraguan Legacy.
Bullet holes would remain visible on Padrón’s factory years later.
The revolution that had driven cigar makers out of Cuba had followed them to Nicaragua.
July 1979
Somoza fled Nicaragua on July 17, 1979.
Two days later, Sandinista forces entered Managua.
More than four decades of Somoza family domination were over.
For Nicaragua’s cigar makers, however, the uncertainty wasn’t.
The new government nationalized businesses, including the Nicaragua Cigar Company.
Yet one of the most revealing chapters of this story isn’t about presidents or revolutionaries.
It’s about workers.
The Joya factory was rebuilt.
Production resumed.
At Padrón, the relationship between the factory and its workforce became even more significant.
During one government shutdown, workers reportedly marched through Estelí demanding that the Padrón factory be allowed to reopen.
José Padrón argued to Sandinista authorities that the company wasn’t simply his business.
It provided jobs Estelí needed.
The argument apparently mattered. Authorities eventually allowed operations to continue and, according to Padrón’s account, at one point reconsidered plans to conscript some factory workers into military service.
The Padrón family’s account of those years provides an extraordinary glimpse of what happens when a luxury business suddenly becomes entangled with revolution, employment and survival.
The cigar had become something more important than luxury.
For families in Estelí, it was a paycheck.
Another War, Another Embargo
Peace did not follow the revolution.
The Sandinista government soon faced the U.S.-backed Contra insurgency, and Nicaragua entered another violent chapter.
Then the American market effectively disappeared.
In 1985, President Ronald Reagan imposed a comprehensive trade embargo on Nicaragua, cutting Nicaraguan products off from the U.S. market.
For an industry producing premium cigars primarily for export, the consequences were severe.
Joya de Nicaragua describes cigars piling up while wages became increasingly difficult to sustain.
Padrón shifted cigar production to Honduras.
Again, Nicaragua’s cigar industry appeared capable of disappearing.
Again, it didn’t.
Following the 1990 election and political transition, the United States lifted the embargo.
Factories returned.
Investment followed.
Then came another cigar boom.
Estelí Becomes Cigar Country
Drive into modern Estelí and tobacco isn’t hidden somewhere beyond the city.
It is part of the city’s identity.
Fields surround the region.
Factories employ thousands.
Wooden cigar boxes have to be manufactured. Packaging has to be printed. Tobacco has to be planted, picked, transported, sorted, fermented and aged.
Restaurants feed workers and visitors.
Hotels receive cigar tourists.
Drivers transport buyers and industry executives.
Tour operators take visitors into fields and factories.
The cigar creates an ecosystem.
And Nicaragua eventually accomplished something that would have seemed improbable when those first Cuban seeds were planted.
It overtook the Dominican Republic as the largest source of premium handmade cigars entering the United States.
According to Cigar Association of America figures reported by Cigar Aficionado, Nicaragua shipped approximately 258.4 million premium cigars to the United States in 2025 — roughly 60 percent of U.S. premium cigar imports.
The refugee industry had become the market leader.
But numbers like 258 million can hide something.
Every handmade cigar still passes through human hands.
The Hands Behind the Cigar
Watch an experienced cigar roller work and the movement can appear effortless.
It isn’t.
Premium cigar manufacturing remains extraordinarily dependent upon skilled manual labor.
Leaves are inspected and sorted.
Filler tobacco is selected.
The bunch is formed.
Binder is applied.
Wrapper — sometimes the most visually perfect and expensive leaf on the cigar — is carefully stretched and rolled around the bunch.
The cap is cut and applied.
Then come inspection, color sorting, banding, boxing and packaging.
Many of those hands belong to women.
Research conducted in Nicaragua has repeatedly described tobacco manufacturing as one of Estelí’s important sources of employment and an economic engine supporting jobs beyond the factory itself.
Researchers at Nicaragua’s Universidad Nacional Autónoma de Nicaragua (UNAN) have also studied the socioeconomic circumstances and occupational conditions of tobacco workers in Estelí. The university’s digital research repository provides an interesting counterpoint to the industry’s marketing material because it allows the experiences of workers and researchers inside Nicaragua to enter the story.
That matters.
Factory work can provide regular wages in a country where economic opportunities are limited.
But employment is not the same thing as prosperity.
What Does the Worker Get?
This may be the most uncomfortable question in the story.
A premium Nicaraguan cigar sold in the United States can cost $10, $15, $20 or considerably more.
The person who helped make it obviously doesn’t receive anything close to that.
That doesn’t automatically mean exploitation.
Retail pricing includes tobacco cultivation, years of inventory carrying costs, manufacturing, packaging, transportation, taxes, distribution, retail margins and considerable business risk.
But the contrast deserves examination.
Research available through UNAN’s academic repository has examined occupational health, workplace conditions and socioeconomic issues involving Nicaragua’s tobacco workforce.
Some studies of Estelí cigar factories have identified concerns involving employee motivation, working conditions, training, compensation and workplace safety.
Those findings shouldn’t be used to condemn an entire industry based upon individual factories or studies conducted at particular moments.
But neither should they disappear beneath romantic photographs of tobacco fields.
Both realities can exist simultaneously.
The cigar industry can provide desperately important employment.
And some of those jobs can still be difficult, inadequately compensated or physically demanding.
That’s the contradiction worth understanding.
When an Entire City Depends on a Luxury
There is another side to becoming cigar country.
Dependency.
Tobacco has become one of Estelí’s dominant economic engines.
That means a boom in premium cigars can ripple through the city.
It also means a downturn can do the same.
When factories cut production, the consequences aren’t confined to cigar-company balance sheets.
Workers lose hours.
Families lose income.
Businesses serving those workers feel it.
The same cigar that represents leisure to someone sitting in a lounge in Atlanta may represent rent, groceries and school expenses to a household in Estelí.
Perhaps that is the most important connection between the cigar smoker and Nicaragua.
They participate in the same economy while experiencing it from opposite ends.
And Yet, There Is Pride
None of this means we should view Nicaragua’s cigar workers merely as victims of an international luxury industry.
That would be another kind of stereotype.
Cigar making is skilled work.
Generations of knowledge have developed in Nicaragua since those Cuban tobacco pioneers arrived.
Nicaraguan growers understand their fields.
Sorters learn tobacco by sight and touch.
Rollers develop remarkable dexterity and consistency.
Blenders understand how tobacco from Estelí behaves differently from tobacco grown in Jalapa, Condega or Ometepe.
There is craftsmanship here.
And increasingly there is national identity.
The cigar is no longer simply something Cuban immigrants taught Nicaragua to manufacture.
More than half a century later, it belongs to Nicaragua.
The World Behind the Cigar
So perhaps the next time you light a Nicaraguan cigar, take another look at the band.
Not because the band tells you everything.
Because it tells you almost nothing.
It doesn’t show you the volcanic soil.
It doesn’t show you the Cuban exiles searching for somewhere to begin again.
It doesn’t show you Anastasio Somoza discovering Nicaraguan cigars in the White House and deciding he wanted a piece of the business.
It doesn’t show you the dictatorship’s strange intersection of politics, money, nightlife and vice.
It doesn’t show you the revolutionaries.
Or the burned factories.
Or the bullet holes.
It doesn’t show you the workers who rebuilt.
It doesn’t show you the woman sorting wrapper leaf or the roller whose hands will repeat the same practiced movement hundreds of times before going home.
It doesn’t show you Estelí.
But all of that is there.
Rolled inside.
And perhaps that’s why Nicaragua is worth understanding not simply as one of the world’s great cigar producers, but as a destination.
Go for the tobacco fields.
Walk through a factory.
Talk to the people making the cigars.
Eat what they eat.
Drink what they drink.
Walk the streets beyond the factory gates.
Ask what changed when tobacco money arrived.
Ask who prospered.
Ask who didn’t.
Because sometimes the most interesting thing about a cigar has nothing to do with how it tastes.
It is the world that put it in your hand.
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Nicaragua is only one part of a much larger story. Explore the ThinkCigar Cigar Lifestyle Hub for more stories about the people, places, traditions, travel, rituals and experiences that make the cigar about far more than what we smoke.
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