Cigar Aficionado

With its trickling fountain and cloistered courtyard, Plasencia Cigars S.A. in Nicaragua seems more like a monastery than a factory. Workers holding tobacco quietly walk from one end of the covered quadrangle to the other, sometimes in pairs, then disappear through a doorway. Somehow, all the noise of Estelí outside of these four walls has been neutralized.

It’s equally tranquil in the rolling gallery, where cigarmakers toil at every table as though they’ve taken a vow of silence. When Nestor Andrés Plasencia Jr. walks into the room, one roller notices, then another, and then another until the rustling of tobacco stops and suddenly, everyone is banging their metal chavetas against the table tops. It isn’t a form of protest or discord. It’s applause and one of the most endearing sounds anyone in the cigar industry can hope to hear.

Wearing a woven Panama hat and close-cropped beard, Plasencia smiles and nods in appreciation before circulating around the room to inspect some cigars. Every boss wants to be loved and respected, and maybe even a little feared. Now 49 years old, Plasencia seems to have all three in the perfect amounts. His walk is far from menacing, but it’s certainly confident. This isn’t just Nestor Plasencia Sr.’s kid anymore, skipping around the factory like a carefree heir apparent. This is the man in charge.

“When I first started working, I had to earn the respect of the workers, so I had to wake up earlier than everyone,” Plasencia says after his inspections are over. He’s smoking a thick robusto and sipping a cafecito in a small lounge he built on the other side of the courtyard. “I didn’t want to impose my authority. It’s a moral authority. It was a process.”

If you smoke cigars, you’ve most likely smoked tobacco grown by the Plasencia family—whether you know it or not. The company is easily the largest grower of tobacco leaf in Central America and sells cigar tobacco to most of the major cigarmakers in the handmade sector. In addition to its massive growing and brokerage operation, Plasencia Cigars maintains factories in both Honduras and Nicaragua, producing more than 45 million cigars a year. Most of the cigars are for third-party companies, but a good number are Plasencia’s own brands. At the helm are Nestor and his father, Nestor Sr. The elder Plasencia shows little signs of slowing down, while the younger has done all he can to bring the company into the 21st century.

“He’s the big boss in charge of everything. Everything,” Nestor Jr. says of his father with wide-eyed emphasis. “He’s going to be 75 this year. The energy that he still has—I get tired when I go with him to the farms. He’ll drive for two hours to one farm all in the same day.”

Nestor Jr. is a fifth-generation tobacco man who splits his time between Honduras and Nicaragua overseeing his family’s vast network of tobacco farms and cigar factories. Despite his huge responsibilities, he still shows deference to his father. This particular facility in Nicaragua, which produces about seven million cigars a year, is only a small part of Plasencia’s operation, but a very important one. It’s the home of his Alma Fuerte brand, the line that transformed him from a farmer who also happens to make cigars to a legitimate producer in the arena. Plasencia-branded cigars have scored in the 90s repeatedly, and have made several appearances on Cigar Aficionado’s Top 25 list.

Simply stated, nobody in Central America grows more tobacco for the cigar industry than the Plasencia family. By Plasencia’s estimation, his company supplies leaf to about 70 percent of the cigar industry. “All the big guys,” he says matter-of-factly. This includes Altadis U.S.A., Davidoff of Geneva and General Cigar Co. (which owns 20 percent of Plasencia’s company). On the production side, Plasencia not only has a portfolio of its own brands, but produces many third-party brands such as Alec Bradley, Ferio Tego, a few versions of Romeo y Julieta and, his biggest cigar client of all, Rocky Patel, who has some of his Honduran cigars rolled in a Plasencia factory.

Beauty is rarely a consideration when building a cigar factory. The goal is efficiency, not a spread in Architectural Digest, but the monastic feel of Plasencia Cigars in Estelí was by design.

“We built this together with Dannemann in 1996,” Nestor Jr. says, referring to the time when Dannemann, a European company known for machine-made smokes, wanted to get into the side of the business. The two companies partnered in a short-lived venture. “We used to sell tobacco to them. We made cigars for them too, so we built it together and we were going to make cigars for a distribution company that they had in the United States. Then they decided to get out of and focus on cigarillos, so we bought their part of the factory and took it over in the early 2000s.”

The Plasencia story, of course, goes back much further. Like many tobacco growers in Central America and the Caribbean, the family legacy began in Cuba. According to the history, the Plasencias started producing tobacco in 1865, but they didn’t grow their first crop in Nicaragua until 100 years later. After fleeing Cuba in the 1960s when the Castro regime nationalized Cuba’s cigar and tobacco industries, Plasencia’s father, Nestor Sr., and his grandfather, Sixto, relocated to Central America. Like so many disenfranchised tobacco growers in Cuba, they were looking to start over. The story is almost biblical—an exodus and a genesis.

“We started two farms in Jalapa, one candela and something else Cuban seed,” he says of his family’s venture. Then, nationalization happened all over again, this time in Nicaragua. “The Sandinista government forced my father out so he started from scratch in Honduras. I love his determination and I respect that guy so much.”

When the Sandinista regime took over Nicaragua in 1979, it nationalized the agricultural industry and seized the country’s tobacco farms. Manufacturers could still produce cigars in Nicaragua but they couldn’t farm the land and were forced to purchase tobacco directly from the government, which concentrated on volume over quantity. Furthermore, an outbreak of blue mold laid waste to Nicaragua’s wrapper production. Things in Nicaragua were grim.

Familiar with revolutions and the ramifications of government takeovers, the Plasencias moved north to Honduras. Nestor Jr. was only three years old. Eventually, the tides turned in 1990 when the Sandinista government was voted out of office and Violeta Barrios de Chamorro was voted in.

“When Chamorro won the elections, she needed some investors,” Nestor Jr. says. At the time, Nicaragua had amassed $12.5 billion in debt while only having a gross domestic product of $1.8 billion. “In 1992, a lot of people were reclaiming their land. The government was willing to give back some land in order to restart the economy. It was a long process, but we got 30 percent of it back. This was in Estelí.”

Though understandably a little suspicious of the new government, Plasencia’s father had enough incentive to start a Nicaraguan cigar factory in 1994 in Ocotál, but he still kept all the operations he’d established in Honduras.

“He wanted to diversify so that all his eggs were not in one basket,” Nestor Jr. says. “The factory made mostly private labels. He also subsidized farmers—we’d give technical assistance and then buy the crop. Mostly sun-grown tobacco.”

Nestor Jr. knew from childhood that he’d be ing his father in the tobacco business. First, he graduated from the Zamorano Pan-American Agricultural School in Honduras in 1998. Then, he went to work with the family business immediately after. Today, the Plasencias grow more than 4,000 acres of tobacco in Nicaragua and Honduras. They plant a variety of strains such as Corojo, and even some Connecticut shade, but the majority is a Criollo hybrid they developed, simply referred to as Havana.

“It’s a phenotype that we like,” he explains. “We crossed it with Criollo ’92 and Corojo. We look for disease resistance and a leaf that can adapt to climate. We use a slightly different type in Jalapa because the climate is different. The idea is to put the seeds where they’re most comfortable.”

This tobacco is best expressed in Plasencia’s Alma Fuerte series. It was released in 2016 and rolled with his Criollo hybrid from different areas of Nicaragua. All the tobacco is exceptionally aged, taken from the company’s large library of leaf stock, an inventory estimated at seven million pounds. The cigars in the line got the attention of this magazine, all of them scoring quite well, but none were as visually striking and balanced as the Generacion V—a Salomon that tapers out at the bottom and peaks at the top with a beautiful belicoso head. It was named the No. 9 Cigar of 2017, scoring 93 points.

Alma Fuerte translates to “strong soul” and it was more than just a high-scoring cigar for Plasencia. It was a major turning point. Previously, the company focused on growing tobacco, brokering leaf to the industry and making cigars for other companies. Its own attempts at cigars, namely the Plasencia Reserva Organica in the early 2000s, fell short. They paid lip service to organic farming, but ultimately were forgettable smokes. When Plasencia decided to go into his tobacco archives for Alma Fuerte more than a decade later, he put together a masterpiece and had his first truly serious cigar.

“Organica was a team effort,” Nestor Jr. recalls. “In the beginning, the tobacco was just from Jalapa. Then we started growing organically in Estelí. Then we put the cigars together. Someone else was distributing the brand, which is why it didn’t do so well.”

Alma Fuerte was a different story. Years later, Plasencia was not only a better blender, but had a clearer understanding of what the market wanted. Furthermore, Plasencia had taken over distribution with the formation of his own company, Plasencia 1865, evoking his family’s history.

“The timing was perfect” he says. “Everyone was afraid to bring new things to the market because of FDA regulations, but I said we’re going to do it and invest in the brand. People in the industry discouraged it because it was very expensive and nobody knew the name.”

Plasencia took advantage of his momentum, releasing more cigars under the Alma series: Alma del Fuego, Alma del Campo and Alma Fuerte Colorado Claro. The blends are different, but all the cigars have one thing in common: well-aged tobacco. According to Plasencia, all the tobacco in Alma Fuerte is at least 10 years old, but only some of it was grown organically.

Definitions of organic can vary and the term has become overused, but the Plasencia Reserva Organica (renamed Reserva Original) is made only with tobacco grown with organic fertilizers and a complete shunning of synthetic pesticides. Plasencia considers himself to be an eco-conscious agronomist. The whole operation is far from being completely organic—one plot here, another plot there—but this is the ultimate goal. His first foray into growing tobacco organically was, as he puts it, a disaster.

“I didn’t know anything,” he says with a laugh. “The tobacco grows so fast so it needs a lot of nutrition. We tried cow manure, chicken manure. Nothing grew. The tobacco stayed little and yellow and full of pests. My father said I was crazy and that it wouldn’t work, but he always let me try and keep trying. When I found vermicompost is when everything changed.”

Vermicompost is essentially earthworm manure. It’s expensive and time-consuming to produce, but Plasencia uses it whenever he can, drawing from his own worm farms. For him, it’s a secret ingredient of sorts and one that gives his tobacco some distinction. About 15 percent of his farms are organic. The yields are low and it’s more expensive to grow organically, but Plasencia believes that the resulting tobacco is of high quality. “Little by little,” he says.

Though Nicaragua is the hot country right now—it’s the leading exporter of cigars to the United States—Honduras continues to quietly expand. Plasencia grows more tobacco in Honduras than he does in Nicaragua and produces more cigars in his Honduran factories than he does in Estelí.

Honduras is the home of Plasencia’s Cosecha series, the most distinguished Honduran cigar brand in his portfolio. Like Alma Fuerte, he leverages his huge inventories of aged tobacco to define the cigars. Each vintage-specific line only uses tobacco from banner years, and is named for the crop number. Cosecha 146, for example, represents the family’s 146th harvest, and is made up of tobacco from the 2011-2012 crop. The La Vega size made Cigar Aficionado’s Top 25 list of 2020 at 93 points. The all-Honduran Cosechas 149 and 151 followed (the La Musica size scored 92 points). Few companies are in a position to release blends of such specificity and Nestor Jr. sees the Cosecha series as a chance to showcase Honduran leaf.

“Honduras doesn’t have the recognition it deserves,” Nestor Jr. insists. He divides each month between Nicaragua and Honduras, driving the narrow, winding, sometimes treacherous mountain roads of the Pan-American Highway north every other week to his father who oversees the factory and field operations. Even the slightest veer could mean a head-on collision, a crash into a jagged mountain wall or plummeting off a cliff. None of this appears to bother him.

“I learned the work ethic from my dad. We have great communication,” he says. “I’m still learning. He still sees things I miss and he feels things. I ire him, but he thinks I spend too much money.” Nestor Jr. takes a big puff and laughs a bit before adding: “He’s from another generation.”

Nestor Plasencia Sr. has gained an innate instinct for tobacco that only decades in the fields can impart. Even at his age, the word “retirement” is never part of the conversation and he seems to have no intention of stepping away from farm or factory life.

“I never thought when we left Cuba that we were going to have a company like the one that now exists,” he says. “I feel very blessed because thanks to hard work and the help of a great team, we have been able to get to where we are right now.”

Nestor Sr. had always intended his son to be part of the business and Jr. had every intention of ing. While the love of tobacco isn’t genetic, it can certainly be ed on.

“Since he was a child, I used to take Nestor Andrés to the farms to observe and work so that he would become interested in tobacco, just as my father did with me,” recalls Nestor Sr. “Since 1865, we have been directly involved in tobacco and it really fascinates us. I can say that Nestor really did learn quickly because he liked it very much and then went to study agronomy, which made him much more professional.”

The question now is whether or not there will be a sixth generation of tobacco men working in the Plasencia family. And will they ever be able to go 100 percent organic? The sun in Nicaragua starts to set, leaving the courtyard in a chilly shadow, and most of the employees have gone home for the day. Nestor Jr. ponders the question.

“I am very blessed with four wonderful children and I do the same thing my father did with me. I’ve taken them from a very young age to the farms and factories. The older ones also accompany me to cigar events. I would be very happy for them to get involved in the business but only if they are happy and ionate about it, as it requires a lot of work. They should never feel like they have to do it out of obligation. My biggest goal is for my children to be happy. But I am sure that already the sixth generation of the family has a lot of love for tobacco.”