Members of the executive team standing in front of boxes of blended tobacco at the massive and new Tabacalera de Garcia factory in La Romana, Dominican Republic. From left: Rafael Nodal, Pedro Ventura, Javier Estades, and Ricardo Nieto.
Cigar giant Tabacalera USA makes cigars in a host of countries, but its biggest factory is Tabacalera de Garcia, located in La Romana, Dominican Republic. When Tabacalera USA and Altadis U.S.A. were part of Imperial Brands PLC, the factory made both handmade and machine-made cigars, but after the company was sold in 2020, the operations were split into two. Imperial retained the machine-made operations, and Altadis recreated Tabacalera de Garcia not far from its original site, building a massive factory complex dedicated solely to the production of handmade cigars.
It was a long construction project that took more than two years. Structures were entirely rebuilt, and all hand-made operations were moved to completely separate facilities, yet this was all done without any interruption in the production process. Today, the separation is almost entirely complete, and more than 2,000 people work at the new Tabacalera de Garcia factory, where some 40 million cigars are made here each year, all of them by hand. The brands produced include such major names as Romeo y Julieta, Montecristo, H. Upmann and VegaFina.
Cigar Aficionado toured the new facility in March. Have a look inside one of the world’s largest cigar factories and see how some of the biggest brands are made.
One leaf of wrapper tobacco makes two wrappers, and a key step in wrapper preparation is removing the stem. This is done by hand in some factories, but Tabacalera de Garcia produces so much wrapper that the company uses these stripping machines. Here, a worker feeds the complete leaf into the machine, the stem is cut away and the result is two pieces of wrapper tobacco.
It takes a staggering amount of tobacco to make 40 million premium cigars a year, and at Tabacalera de Garcia, workers are constantly preparing leaves for production. This worker is patiently separating one leaf at a time of filler tobacco, which will be sorted by size and variety and then put into blending boxes.
Cigarmakers at Tabacalera de Garcia work in pairs, one worker bunching, the other rolling. A buncher here is combining multiple leaves of filler tobacco which will be wrapped by a binder. After being pressed in a mold, it will go on to the roller, who will apply a wrapper leaf.
If a cigar doesn’t draw, it can’t be smoked, and the cigar world has gone to great lengths to eliminate draw problems thanks to draw testing machines like this one. After bunching, and before rolling, the bunch is put in this simple machine which mimics a person puffing. Too tight or too loose and the bunch will be rejected.
One of the four main rolling galleries at Tabacalera de Garcia, each of which has roughly 240 cigarmakers. Every room bears the name of the major cigar brand rolled there, and this is the Montecristo Room. The rolling stations here are taller than most in the cigar world, giving each worker a set-up that resembles a cubicle found in modern office buildings. The upper portion of the workstation is used to store cigars in molds.
The chavetta, a steel knife, is the traditional tool used to trim a wrapper leaf when rolling cigars by hand. Rollers at Tabacalera de Garcia have chavettas (seen at far right) but most employ a small, circular cutter on a handle (the tool with the black handle), which is quite similar to a miniature pizza cutter.
The rounded heads of cigars made entirely by hand, fresh off the rolling table, awaiting the next step in the packaging process.
Nearly all of the cigarmaking process here is done by hand, and that includes putting on a cigar band—or bands. More and more brands in today’s market are adorned with multiple cigar bands, and a worker here is carefully applying the main band to this VegaFina.
Romeo y Julieta is the biggest brand for Altadis U.S.A., and the company believes it’s the best-selling premium brand in the United States. Many of them are made here, and this pile of Romeos has been wrapped in cellophane, ready to go into boxes and be shipped off to consumers.
Within the sprawling Tabacalera de Garcia compound is a modern cigar box factory, capable of producing shiny, luxurious boxes the company once had to import from China. Today, the company makes most of its boxes on site. This is a sample of some of the work, which includes boxes in a host of colors and styles.
