Punch
One of the oldest surviving Havana marcas, named for the British magazine's puppet mascot; a separate Honduran Punch is sold by General Cigar.
Punch is conventionally dated to 1840 and credited to Manuel Lopez, who aimed the brand at the British market and borrowed the name and the puppet imagery from the satirical magazine Punch. That English orientation shaped the brand for a century: large, traditional formats, plain-spoken bands, and a following in the United Kingdom that outlasted several changes of ownership in Havana.
The Cuban line today is medium-bodied and built around the Punch Punch, the Double Coronas and a set of shorter machine-era formats that survived into the modern catalogue. Production is centred at the La Corona factory. Habanos has used the marca sparingly for limited editions compared with Partagas or Romeo y Julieta, which has kept the range comparatively stable. The brand's British orientation is also visible in its size names, several of which use English rather than Spanish terms.
The non-Cuban Punch is a General Cigar brand made in Honduras, descended from the Villazon operation in Danli. It is a substantially fuller cigar than its Cuban namesake and sells in far larger volumes in the United States. Because the founding date rests on brand tradition rather than surviving registration records, the 1840 figure should be treated as reported rather than documented.