Ampliar

Ampliar

The blunderbuss shot nipped the song he was whistling. He fell off from the horse and barely crawled his way to his Hato de la Cruz estate in Vuelta Abajo. It was night on June 18, 1868. But Don Jaime Buenaventura Ambrós Partagás y Ravell didn’t die that day.
His strength, typical of a man born on the edge of the sea, a bulwark Catalonian hardened by life and business, his aggressive spirit in the courts, in the factories, in the plantations and also in bed, teeming with mightiness at age 52, made him cope with that wound and he lived to tell.
Stubbornness is what actually did him in. Doctors had talked him out of traveling in that condition, but no one could ever contradict him. He left for Havana. He probably thought there could be a second shot or that he could be poisoned. He was very successful and therefore he had too many foes.
He never made it to his destination. He passed away 29 days later at some friends’ house in the city of Pinar del Rio. That marked the decline of the Partagas family and, paradoxically, the beginning of the legend of his peculiar habanos.

FROM TAILOR TO CIGAR MAKER
Arenys de Mar was a fledgling seaport on the Catalonian coast back in the early 19th century. Countless immigrants had sailed away from there toward the “always faithful” island of Cuba, at the time in the possession of the Spanish colonial rule. Many of those dreamers wound up in other ports similar to Havana, where rather than sailing or fishing, they did what they knew best: business.
So, the young Jaime left his small town in 1831. He was barely 14 years old. He had staunchly said in his place that he had no intention to follow in his father’s or grandfather’s footsteps, who had been involved for over two generations in the family business: tailoring.
However, his father’s and grandpa’s relations opened up the way for the young Jaime, who arrived in Havana to find shelter under the wing of Don Juan Conill y Pí, at that time one of the most important warehouse keepers of loose tobacco and who eventually helped many young Catalonians to elbow their way through Cuba, like he did with Jaime and the celebrated Jose Gener.
But the young Jaime didn’t seem happy with the idea of running or stashing somebody else’s bales. He soon learned the secrets of cigar hand-rolling and by 1845, together with Gerardo Marti –another of Conill’s apprentices- he opened a small factory that quickly began to give itself a good name for its habanos.
For Don Jaime –as he was known- running a cigar factory of his own wasn’t good enough. He wanted more. And he left for Vuelta Abajo with the first savings he socked away to buy the Hato de la Cruz farm, boasting hundreds of acres, in the municipality of Consolacion del Sur, in the Pinar del Rio province.
There, he not only planted his own tobacco seeds, but he also experimented with new techniques to make the plants far more resistant and their leaves more aromatic. He eventually introduced the aging process that could give his cigars a peerless taste, something that made him stand out from among his competitors.
As the wise man he was when doing business, he built a couple of grocery stores and item shops in his lands, so peasants could pay with their own harvests, a move that clinched not only a sufficient amount of tobacco for his ever-growing cigar factory, but also far better leaves than those of his competitors.
Don Jaime was growing as a tobacco mogul and savvy businessman as more and more enemies were swarming around him.
Perhaps he had no enemy as formidable as the Cabañas family, in the person of Francisco Alvarez Cabañas or Francisco Cabañas –as he was known in the tobacco industry- who kept him tied up in a lawsuit for eight long years over the property of the La Flor de Cabañas trademark, registered in 1848 by Don Jaime Partagas and that had been in his possession for a mighty long time, even though he was not using that name.
Those were times of judges and courthouses, of grudges and wicked bickering, of public insults and mutual cloak-and-dagger traps, until Don Jaime lost the appeal and was forced to let go of the trademark.
But he didn’t need it at all by that time. The fame of his habanos had simply moved beyond the borders and washed ashore in Europe, even in the Spanish court. Don Jaime could even afford to rename his cigars under the La Flor de Tabacos de Partagas brand and even hanged a new shingle outside his large workshop that read “Royal Cigar Factory”.
Word has it that it was there where vitolas of ring gauges and sizes other than those in the markets started to be churned out, where painters and handcrafters used to gather to embellish the boxes and jars, and where the emblematic cigar factory readers –an idea thought up by Don Jaime, always shrewd and foreseeing, who knew nothing could get a better cigar than the hands of an inspired cigar roller- first popped up.
That led him to winning countless awards and prizes, including the First Class Medal at the 1855 International Expo in France, and the Gold Medal at the 1862 International Exhibit in Paris, among others that from that time on started to spruce up the brand’s cigar boxes.
Yet Don Jaime had piled up lots of grudges on him. Married to Catalina Puig and with five children –José (1847), Teresa (1849), Clementina (1851), Catalina (1853) and Adela (1854)- he had no qualms about sleeping with one of his most gorgeous slaves, and that attitude had set tongues wagging.
In the same breath, he was nurturing his grudge with the Cabañas and with fellow Catalonian Pedro Mato, who had partnered with Ramon Novell, owners of the lands next to his in Vuelta Abajo. With that view in mind, maybe the shot that killed him took too long.
The black slave who fired the blunderbuss shot, Pedro Diaz, used to work for him and he was said to be jealous because Don Jaime used to do his wife some favors. For others, Diaz was nothing but a thug.
Tortured and beaten for days, he never confessed and was sentenced to death. He never made it to the gallows. He was found dead three days later in his cell. Perhaps he actually knew too much.

A TASTE BENCHMARK
The murder of Don Jaime Partagas shocked Cuba and the news spread out –like his habanos- like a prairie fire across the world. Paradoxically, his demise put his cigars further on the map and their price tags ramped up not only for their quality, but also for the legend around them.
Unfortunately, the son was not a chip off the old block. His first child, Jose Partagas Puig, was a lousy businessman and in less than ten years he did away with the empire his father had built in the course of two decades.
Riddled with doubts and stalked by creditors, his only choice was to sit down with Jose Gener Batet to bargain an initial IOU for his tobacco plantations in Hato de la Cruz, and later on with Asturian banker Juan Antonio Bances Alvarez, who would up running the family business.
Bances was no doubt of the men who bent over backwards to underscore the fame of the Partagas habanos, to such an extent that he ordered the phrase “Partagas and nothing else” to be stamped on the boxes in a bid to highlight the quality of those cigars.
Bances was bound to sell off his properties in 1900 to the Cifuentes family, the one that kept the cigar factory going till the 1959 Revolution when the majestic workshop was eventually nationalized.
Nonetheless, the ups and downs of both time and history never made a dent in the quality and fame of Partagas, a brand with one of the largest vitola stocks that’s still penciled in as a taste benchmark in the realm of habanos.
Don Jaime, severed by a deadly shot, never lived to see how his cigars have panned out to be a token of distinction and good taste; and they remain that way 170 years after their creation. Those are no doubt habanos fit for a king.