According to the report, the government purchased a Falcon 900 model, manufactured in 2003, at a cost of approximately $10 million.
Is there any greater comedy than the Cuban government and its decision making? Spending $10M on a private jet for Diaz-Canel is so ludicrous I thought I was reading an Onion article.
A new price list published this week in Spain shows that around 365 SKUs have increased from their 2024 prices—nearly the entire Cuban cigar portfolio—with an average increase of 5 percent.
The most notable increase affects the Cohiba Behike BHK line, a flagship series from Habanos S.A. Its three cigars have increased by 21-22 percent and are now priced per cigar at:
Behike BHK 52 — €230 ($238.20)
Behike BHK 54 — €290 ($300.35)
Behike BHK 56 — €320 ($331.40)
With these new increases, the price of a single BHK is roughly the same as the cost of a box of 10 of the same cigar when it debuted in 2010.
Halfwheel did a great job analyzing this. It's important to note that Spanish taxes are often lower than what we'd see elsewhere, so that has to factor in to the "hey wait a second, this isn't accurate, I'm paying $28 for a Partagás D4" moments you'll inevitably have while reading the linked article.
This is not surprising news, though it is shocking. A box of Montecristo No. 2 is hovering around $900US at online retailers, increasing to likely $950 in '25. Incomprehensible versus the $250-300 price they were only 5 years ago.
Habanos wants to do a billion dollars in revenue annually and probably will look to sell itself once it achieves this. I'd bet they get damn close in '25 and achieve it sufficiently in '26.
New LL out today featuring the Davidoff Winston Churchill The Late Hour Robusto paired with Aberlour 18. We review Cigar Aficionado’s latest Top 25, we debate how The Late Hour has changed over the years and we discover how Davidoff is trying to redefine a cigar’s age statement.
WSJ with one of its better recent opinion pieces on last week's Miami Herald leak of internal Cuban government banking information.
More likely, the Cuban status quo, in which dire privation dominates daily life, has become too foul even for some members of the ruling elite. There’s also this: The military may own GAESA on paper, but the Castro family and its allies are widely believed to be the company’s beneficiaries. Greedy rich Cubans treat GAESA as their property.
Internal pressure is what's needed to fuel change, but it all still seems impossible to me, given the many stories over the last 60 years of another potential uprising.
In a recent report to the United Nations, the Cuban Foreign Ministry blamed the U.S. embargo for depriving the government of the $250 million it needs each year to maintain the electrical grid and the $129 million it needs to provide medical supplies annually to its hospitals. Yet one of GAESA’s companies, Gaviota, which is in the hotel business, “is sitting on about $4.3 billion in its bank accounts,” according the documents.
Unimaginable greed and corruption.
New LL out today featuring the Cohiba Espléndidos paired with champagne and cognac for our NYE extravaganza. We review our best and worst cigars and pairings of the year, I was given a wild listener gift, we share BHK58/59 rumors and facts, we answer an email on podcast origin stories and more.
Happy New Year and thank you for the support throughout 2024.
Lounge Lizards Best of 2024 is out and it came in just shy of five hours of content. We had a great year and I think the program has matured and settled in nicely. There are a lot of memorable moments for me but Chef Ricky joining the panel as our eighth lizard is tops. Thank you for your support this year!
Despite 90s rock radio legends CREED getting back together last year, Alter Bridge, born out of CREED's ashes in the early aughts, remains some of Tremonti and Co.'s best work. "Words Darker Than Their Wings" is a song off their AB III album that rarely sees live performances - I believe less than five ever - due to the demanding lead vocal run at the end. This performance with the Parallax Orchestra in London is a testament to the power of a great modern rock song.
YT: Alter Bridge: "Words Darker Than Their Wings Live at Royal Albert Hall"
I was really praying that CA was going to choose a Cuban Trinidad for Cigar of the Year - which would set us up for about six months of fantastic content after the ridiculous "Year of Trinidad", but alas this year belongs to another big advertiser.
My Father The Judge in Grand Robusto is a surprising choice - not because it's My Father, but because of some of the other cigars the Garcia family makes that perform better and are 'higher end'. Choosing this is the equivalent to choosing a fairly pedestrian cigar from Fuente's Hemingway series - as opposed to an Opus X or a Don Carlos. With that being said, I find the Hemingway series to often perform more consistently than Opus X.
I've ordered these cigars for review and we'll release that episode in the first few weeks of the new year.
New LL out today featuring Bolívar New Gold Medal and Don Fulano 20th Anniversary Tequila Añejo. We discussed a recent Bond Roberts auction milestone, how we think Cuba has changed how it blends new releases (see 'LESS LIGERO', below) and Senator answers a listener email on wine.
I bought a box of NGM as soon as we stopped recording.
The best Cuban cigars have historically required age – generally three to five years in a well-kept humidor – to turn into something beyond ‘smokeable’. Through plant maturation, fermentation and curing - let’s simplify it to ‘time’ - ammonia and other undesired flavors/aromas begin to diminish, while amino acids and simple sugars accumulate¹. Through 500+ years of tobacco production, these processes have constantly evolved to improve harvest and flavor.
In Cuba, I believe something is changing. New releases are more tolerable and less harsh when smoked young, there is a lesser presence of ammonia (even in the last third of a cigar, when combustion is highest and closest to the draw point) and the cigars are burning well. If we weren't discussing Cuba, I would chalk it up to manufacturer’s patience - allowing the tobacco whatever time it needs to produce the flavor profile the marca is looking for. In Cuba, however, time is a scarce resource. Tabacuba does not have the ability to be patient; they’re working on a just-in-time-hopefully manufacturing schedule with a high-pressure distribution partner in Habanos S.A.. With this in mind, I believe the Cuban Tobacco Research Institute and its master blenders are purposefully using less ligero in modern blends to allow for quicker smokeability among consumers.
The recent pricing changes in the Habanos S.A. catalog - with some cigars seeing 400%-500% increases in just 18 months - puts the consumer in a difficult value delta: patience vs. price. Why, if I'm paying $120 for a Cohiba Espléndidos, should I have to rest it at home in my humidor for three to five years to get the proper smoking experience? When the same cigar was $20, the value delta was an accepted part of the deal. Now, a non-whale consumer will likely think very seriously about this purchase.
For the people who make blending decisions in Cuba, this must be part of the new conversation. How can newly-created Cuban cigars be made ready-to-smoke within months of boxing? How can we eliminate the normal period of youth, harshness, the bitterness/sourness of ammonia in the cigar? How can we reduce the strength of a new cigar? If the answer cannot be “more time”, then the answer must be “less ligero”.
We know, for example, that the Cohiba Atabey (a.k.a. BHK59 releasing in March 2026) has no ligero in the blend. While I believe it was designed this way to stand out from the rest of the catalog, I can’t help but posit if readiness-to-smoke factored into the blending decisions.
I believe Cuba is deliberately moving away from creating ligero-heavy blends in newly-blended cigars to sell consumers a cigar that is ready to be smoked today. We've discussed this on the podcast while reviewing the following regular production cigars: La Gloria Cubana Turquinos (Ep. 84, Rating 8.8); Rafael Gonzalez Coronas de Lonsdales (Ep. 105, Rating 8.0); Ramon Allones Allones No. 3 (Ep. 109, Rating 8.6); Hoyo de Monterrey Epicure No. 3 (Ep. 147, Rating 9.2); Quai d'Orsay No. 52 (Ep. 157, Rating 9.6).
Throughout the reviews, we noted a few common characteristics:
• The cigar was young – most only a few months old.
• The cigar was from the original production run of publicly released cigars.
• The cigar was often a departure from its sister cigars inside the same marca - at times we struggled to find flavor and strength parallels at all.
• The cigars all performed drastically better than any of us expected them to at their age.
In the first two years of producing the podcast, I would avoid bringing a cigar for review that was less than a couple years old, as regular production staple cigars in the Cuban catalog do not perform at the high level that most of these new releases did.
I do want to cast a skeptical eye on one conspiracy theory that I’ve seen floated on the internet (and have heard from others in the non-Cuban cigar industry): Cuba is using Dominican, Honduran, Nicaraguan or other non-Cuban tobacco in its cigars. I do not believe this to be true at any scale. Purchasing tobacco from another country requires money, which the Cuban government desperately doesn’t have. Countries are refusing to even finance fuel – a necessity for providing humans with basic needs in Cuba and crucial to the tobacco manufacturing process – and are certainly not giving Cuba credit to quietly purchase raw tobacco.
It's also important to acknowledge the incredible run that Cuban cigars have been on post-COVID. Across all lines, Cuban tobacco has been smoking brilliantly. I believe, in five to ten years, this period will be looked upon as some of the best years of Cuban tobacco - then immediately contradicted by the egregious pricing changes that have been forced upon consumers. Such is the comical contradiction of Cuban cigars - when everything goes wrong, somehow they still find a way to produce magic in tobacco.
Another effect of these decisions: does blending Cuban cigars with less ligero produce a cigar that is going to 'age' poorly or more rapidly - perhaps reaching its flavor and performance peaks years ahead of its predecessors? Does this change reflect an updated approach to buying and collecting new-release Cuban cigars? Should we be looking to smoke our new-release cigars sooner?
I don't yet have the answers to any of these questions but I do know my willingness to smoke younger Cuban cigars has increased dramatically.
¹ I'm no scientist. I learned this from T.C. Tso's "Production, Physiology and Biochemistry of Tobacco Plants"
