Amid Cuba’s months-long fuel and electricity crisis, one of the island’s most iconic exports is feeling the pinch: cigars.
Retailers say the industry is facing one of the worst supply squeeze in history as blackouts, fuel shortages and shipping disruptions make it nearly impossible to produce luxury cigars and get them off the island in the temperature controlled conditions they require.
“I’ve been telling clients, ‘Listen, it’s been months since I can get them,’” said Manu Harit, a London-based cigar specialist whose business is almost entirely built on Cuban cigars.
Over the last year, he said, orders have been filled at only a fraction of what he requested. “At the beginning of the year I ordered £45,000 [around $60,000] of stock and got £5,000 [around $6,650],” he said … In the last few months they have shipped very little inventory,” Harit added.
Consumers, meanwhile, are hoarding whatever they stocked up on over the last few years. “I’ve smoked the Cohiba my whole life and now I can’t get it,” said one American who has long purchased cigars in the UK. “There’s nothing else like it.”
Cuban cigars are incredibly vulnerable because the entire industry is owned and controlled by the country’s communist government. So when national infrastructure breaks down, the cigar industry does too.
Habanos S.A., the company that controls global distribution of Cuban cigars around the world, is half-owned by the Cuban state, with the other half held by foreign private interests.
“There isn’t an alternative… ” Harit said. “Every brand is nationalized” — including Cohiba, Trinidad and Montecristo.
And the process of making the cigars requires a lot of fuel. “All the farms and plantations are a couple hours outside Havana and you need oil and trucks to reach there,” Harit said.
In recent months, Cubans have been largely surviving without electricity, with refrigeration, water pumps, public transportation and even medical tools like ventilators and dialysis in limited supply. Harit has been in touch with a few people on the island — including one taxi driver who waited in line 14 hours for gas and paid £350 (around $465) for two-and-a-half gallons just to be able to drive to one of the cigar factories and pick up a few boxes.
Air cargo has been almost impossible to get in and out of Cuba, so exporters are trying to find ships to move the supplies. But many of those ships have never moved high-end cigars before and don’t know how to keep them in the right conditions and, sources said, some inventory was destroyed because of this issue.
Though Cuban cigars remain illegal to import into the US, demand has surged among buyers in Europe, the Middle East and Asia over the last few years as supply from the communist island has waned. Harit said that, in new markets Dubai and Riyadh, many buyers are buying a dozen boxes — roughly 300 cigars — at a time.
Not surprisingly, prices have exploded. Harit said cigars that sold for about £20 (around $26) each a decade ago now sell for about £160 ($212).
As for when normal supply will return, he acknowledged he has “no idea.” In the interim, fake Cubans are sweeping the market.
But, Harit said, “They’ll never replace the real thing.”