Updated 2026-08-30

Why do the same cigar brands exist in both Cuban and non-Cuban versions?

Because in 1959–60 Cuba's revolutionary government nationalised every cigar factory on the island, and the families behind brands like Cohiba, Montecristo, Partagás and H. Upmann lost the right to make them there. Many rebuilt the same names abroad instead. The result, still true today: one label, two unrelated cigars, made in different countries by different companies.

What actually happened in 1959?

Before the revolution, Cuba's cigar industry was a collection of privately owned factories, several dating to the 1840s, built mostly by Spanish and other European immigrant families who had settled in Havana and Pinar del Río. On 15 September 1960 the new government nationalised the industry outright. Partagás and H. Upmann's owners lost their factories that day, among sixteen seized at once; the state kept both the buildings and the trademarks.

The people who had built the brands mostly left, for Florida, briefly for Spain's Canary Islands, and eventually, for most of the industry, for Nicaragua, Honduras and the Dominican Republic, countries with a climate close enough to Cuba's to grow a related plant, if never quite the same soil. Those exiles are most of the reason a "New World" cigar industry exists at all. (For how that soil difference plays out in the leaf, see Cuba vs New World terroir.)

Two different things then happened to two different kinds of brand. The old, already-famous Cuban names — Partagás, H. Upmann, Romeo y Julieta, Montecristo — got fought over, and each now exists as two separate cigars sharing one label. Later exile families skipped that fight and built brand-new names instead.

Who's making the Cuban version today, and who owns the other half?

Every cigar sold under a Cuban marque is made by Habanos S.A., formed in 1994 as Cuba's exclusive cigar maker and exporter. It has always had a foreign minority partner: the Franco-Spanish firm Altadis bought a 50% stake in 2000, and the UK's Imperial Tobacco (later Imperial Brands) inherited that share when it acquired Altadis in 2008. Reporting from 2020 describes Imperial selling the stake, though not every reference source reflects that sale, so exactly who holds it today isn't consistently reported, and this piece won't guess.

What's well established is simpler and more useful: Altadis's other arm, Altadis U.S.A., outright owns the non-Cuban H. Upmann, Montecristo and Romeo y Julieta, made in the Dominican Republic. So for years, one corporate family has sat on both sides of the Cuban/non-Cuban line for three of these four names, without the cigars themselves ever becoming one product. Different leaf, rolled in different factories: ownership and the physical cigar turned out to be separate questions.

The four names that now exist twice

Three of the four followed the same road: after nationalisation, the US rights ended up with the group that became Altadis, whose factory in La Romana, Dominican Republic makes all three today. Montecristo's founder, Alonso Menéndez, and H. Upmann's owners both fled in 1960 and first tried relaunching in the Canary Islands before the business regrouped there.

Partagás took a different road. Ramón Cifuentes, who managed the brand, was forced out without compensation in 1960. He later relaunched Partagás in the US with General Cigar Company, which registered the American trademark in 1978 and moved production, via a brief stop in Jamaica, to the Dominican Republic by 1979. General Cigar now belongs to the Danish group Scandinavian Tobacco Group: a separate corporate family from the one behind the other three.

Romeo y Julieta's name is simply Spanish for Shakespeare's play.

How can Cohiba be split if no family ever owned it?

Cohiba doesn't fit the exile pattern, because there was no Cohiba to nationalise in 1959: the brand didn't exist yet. By Fidel Castro's own later account, a bodyguard's cigar impressed him enough in the mid-1960s that the state tracked down the roller and built a dedicated factory, El Laguito, to supply the blend to Castro and senior officials. Cuba's tobacco monopoly put Cohiba on public sale for the first time in 1982.

The non-Cuban Cohiba exists for a narrower reason. General Cigar Company had registered "Cohiba" as a US trademark back in 1978, four years before the Cuban version was sold to anyone, and began selling a Dominican-made cigar under that name. Cuba's state tobacco company sued to reclaim it once the two were competing directly, and lost: a federal appeals court ruled for General Cigar in February 2005, and the Supreme Court declined to hear a further appeal in June 2006. General Cigar's Cohiba still carries a disclaimer that it has no connection to the Cuban brand of the same name.

Why isn't there a Cuban Davidoff anymore?

Not every name on the shelf lives a double life today. Davidoff is the case where Cuba simply lost the brand outright. Zino Davidoff, a Geneva tobacconist, put his name on Cuban-made cigars starting in 1968, rolled at the same El Laguito factory that made Cohiba. The partnership ended badly: in August 1989 Davidoff publicly burned over 100,000 cigars he judged weren't good enough to carry his name, and by 1991 Cuban-made Davidoff had stopped entirely, by mutual agreement.

Production then moved to the Dominican Republic, and later Honduras too, under what is now the Oettinger Davidoff Group of Basel, Switzerland. No Cuban Davidoff has been made since. For this one name, the non-Cuban version isn't competing with a Cuban rival: it's simply the only one left.

Why did some exile families build new names instead?

Not every exile had a trademark worth fighting over. Some of the most consequential figures in the modern New World industry left Cuba owning a farm or a factory job, not a global brand, and started again under their own names.

• Padrón: José Orlando Padrón's family tobacco farm near Pinar del Río was nationalised; he left Cuba in 1961 and founded Padrón in Miami in 1964, later moving production to Estelí, Nicaragua for closer access to comparable leaf.
• Oliva: the family had grown tobacco leaf in Pinar del Río since 1886. Gilberto Oliva Sr. left after 1959, farmed in Spain and then Nicaragua from 1969, and didn't launch a finished-cigar brand, Oliva Cigar Co., until 1995, with his son.
• My Father: José "Pepín" García learned to roll as a child in Cuba and built a reputation there before leaving. He later put his own name on a company now run from Estelí, Nicaragua and El Paraíso, Honduras.
• Arturo Fuente: the outlier by date. Arturo Fuente left Cuba for Tampa, Florida in 1902 and founded his company there in 1912, decades before the revolution. His descendants kept it running through a 1924 factory fire, a 1946 relaunch from a home porch, and repeated relocations, ending in the Dominican Republic from 1980.

None of these four has a Cuban counterpart competing for the name, because none is a continuation of something the state now owns. They're a separate branch of the same displacement.

Which houses have no Cuba story at all?

Two names are worth including for the opposite reason: nothing in 1959 touches them. Toscano traces to a state tobacco factory founded in the Grand Duchy of Tuscany in 1818, uses fermented Kentucky-seed tobacco cured over oak and beech fires rather than the Cuban-seed leaf this whole story concerns, and is still made in Italy today. Villiger was founded in 1888 by Jean Villiger in the Swiss village of Pfeffikon and remains family-run five generations later, known mainly for machine-made cigars and cigarillos rather than the hand-rolled category the rest of this history is about.

It's also worth noting that none of this shows on a band. A printed name doesn't say which of two unrelated factories rolled the cigar in your hand, one reason band text alone is a weaker signal than people assume, a point covered in why band-only cigar scanners fail.

The short version

• In 1959–60 Cuba nationalised its cigar factories and kept the brand names; the families behind those brands mostly left.
• Partagás, H. Upmann, Romeo y Julieta and Montecristo now exist as two separate cigars under one name: a Cuban one from Habanos S.A., and a non-Cuban one made mostly in the Dominican Republic.
• Cohiba never had a pre-revolution family owner: it's a state creation whose US trademark ended up with a different company after a legal fight that closed in 2006.
• Davidoff went the other way. Cuba lost the entire brand in 1991, and no Cuban version has existed since.
• Padrón, Oliva, My Father and Arturo Fuente took a separate exile path: building brand-new names rather than fighting over old ones.