José Orlando Padrón's family had been growing tobacco for generations in the Cuban province of Pinar del Río — his great-grandfather Damaso had emigrated from the Canary Islands to Cuba in the late 1800s and planted the seeds of what would become a dynasty. But when Fidel Castro took power in 1959, Orlando — who had briefly fought alongside Castro before realizing the revolution's true direction — fled to Spain and eventually made his way to Miami, arriving with nothing. A friend gave him a small hammer and asked him to put it to good use. Working 18-hour days, mowing lawns by day and doing carpentry by night, Orlando saved $600 — money earned with that hammer — and used every cent of it to open Padrón Cigars in September of 1964. He started with a single cigar roller and a vision: to recreate the great Cuban cigars that Miami's exile community could no longer find. He had discovered that a valley in the Estelí region of Nicaragua had a microclimate and soil quality remarkably similar to those of Pinar del Río — and he built his entire legacy on that foundation.
The road was anything but smooth. The Padrón family survived two wars in Nicaragua, four bombings of their Miami factory, and an attempted kidnapping — yet Orlando never wavered. After each bombing, he hung a sign outside the damaged factory bearing the words of Cuban poet José Martí: "Mankind is composed of two sorts of men — those who love and create, and those who hate and destroy." That spirit of defiant craftsmanship defines Padrón to this day. Now led by Orlando's son Jorge, the company produces more than 3.5 million handcrafted cigars a year, all made from Nicaraguan tobacco grown on their own farms in Estelí — fully vertically integrated from seed to band. The portfolio, spanning the iconic 1964 Anniversary Series, the celebrated 1926 Series, and the legendary 80th Anniversary, has accumulated more 100-point scores and Cigar of the Year honors than virtually any other brand in history. The little hammer still sits in the family's possession, a reminder of where it all began.
