Jose Orlando Padron
Cuban exile who founded Padron Cigars in Miami in 1964 and built it into one of the most respected Nicaraguan puro makers; died in 2017.
Padron was born in 1926 into a tobacco-growing family in Pinar del Rio whose involvement in the crop dated to the 1850s. The family's land was confiscated in 1961, and he left Cuba by way of Spain and New York before settling in Miami. He worked as a carpenter, and a hammer given to him during that period became the emblem of the company he founded on 8 September 1964 with about six hundred dollars in savings.
He moved manufacturing to Nicaragua in 1970, an unusual bet at the time, and stayed through the revolution and the years of conflict that followed, at points producing in Honduras when Nicaraguan operations were disrupted. His approach was narrow by design: a small number of lines, Nicaraguan tobacco only, extended aging of leaf before rolling, and box-pressing across almost the whole range.
The 1964 Anniversary Series, released in 1994, and the Serie 1926, created in 2002 for his seventy-fifth birthday, established the company at the top of the non-Cuban market. Padron died on 5 December 2017. The business remains family-owned and is led by his son Jorge. The company he built remains one of the few large premium makers that produces nothing for other brands and has never sold a controlling stake.