P
Patriot Games
Guest
http://www.jrcigars.com/catalogs/2007-2_full.pdf
What's going to happen when the Cuban embargo ends?
There have been many stories in the press, both here and abroad, about the
intestinal problems of Cuba's 80-year-old leader, Fidel Castro. These
stories have given rise to an onslaught of letters sent to us here in North
Carolina that ask, "What's gonna happen if Castro dies?"."if the embargo
ends?". "if trademark issues stop the importation of Cuban cigars?". "if the
price of Havanas will be higher than the current cigars available?". etc.,
etc., etc.
Well, I can't answer all those letters individually... heck, I hardly have
the time to write this catalogue every other month. It ain't easy being a
cigar magnate you know, and I've got a murderous schedule as it is: Monday
night is usually football (I don't play anymore; I just watch); then Tuesday
nights, there's two TV shows I watch - one is called Heroes, which involves
a whole slew of people with super-powers, who are trying to save the world
from destruction and the other is called Friday Night Lights (which, for
some strange reason, is on TV on Tuesdays) which is about a high school
football team in West Texas. It's a serialized version of the motion picture
Friday Night Lights with Billy Bob Thornton, and it even has some of the
same actors in it). Let's see, where was I? Oh yeah! So, Wednesday night is
out because of a weekly poker game I play in.
Say? Did I ever tell you people that my grandfather was a professional poker
player? Well, he was. He came over from Russia in the early 1900s and couldn't
read, write, or speak a word of English, but he could play poker! By the
time he was in this country for 30 days, he owned two apartment buildings in
Brooklyn. No wonder Europeans thought of America as the land of opportunity!
Let's see... where was I? Oh yeah, every Thursday night, me and LaVonda go
to an Italian restaurant call L'Allegria where they don't mind us playing
Scrabble in the bar area while we eat (we used to go there on Wednesdays,
but every Wednesday they have a substitute piano player who must be half
deaf because he plays so loud that we can't hear each other's Scrabble
scores after each turn! What a freakin' nerve that guy has screwing up our
game like that). Then, Friday, it's Battlestar Galactica, by far the best
show on TV since Alias was cancelled.
So, that just leaves the weekends to answer all these e-mails and letters
about Cuba and I've spent too many years working seven days a week to devote
my weekends at this late stageof the game to the business of writing about
cigars.
If you really wanna know what I think is gonna happen when Fidel passes
away - and it could happen before this catalogue even gets printed - then
read this excerpt from Cigar Magazine that I wrote a while ago.
Frankly, anybody that's really interested in cigars should have a
subscription because it's the one and only magazine that will give you the
unvarnished truth about the cigars legally available in the United States.
Every other magazine has to worry about every period and punctuation mark
possibly alienating a potential advertiser. I can tell you for a fact that
Cigar Magazine is a magazine entirely devoted to the cigar consumer and no
one else! If manufacturers choose to advertise there, well, that's fine and
dandy. And if they choose to advertise only in magazines that play up their
cigars as being the cat's meow, well, that's their choice to make too. One
of my many tasks is to give the yay or nay on advertisements that go into
Cigar Magazine.
I've got some pretty simple rules: 1) No one is allowed to advertise a Web
site, an address, or a telephone number in an advertisement that might
compromise the name or address of a consumer who buys the magazine in a
retail tobacco shop. Doing so would harm the tobacconists that handle the
magazine. 2) The advertisements cannot make claims that industry
professionals would know to be patently false. (Example: advertising a
largevolume production cigar to contain 10- or 15-year-old tobaccos, or
hitherto undiscovered pre-embargo tobaccos. I cannot even guess how many
such ads have been denied space in CM.)
Okay already... Here's the article on Cuba (with a few touch-ups to make it
more current) that appeared in CM. At this point, no one has any idea if and
when the forty-plus-year embargo between the US and Cuba will end. Some
industry experts say that the embargo will never end as long as Fidel Castro
remains in power, citing that Cuba and its people have been economically
deprived during Castro's entire reign, and particularly hard-pressed since
the fall of the Soviet Union, which was Cuba's principal trading partner and
source of economic aid.
Proponents of this argument maintain that Fidel Castro has always had the US
embargo to blame for Cuba's economic woes, rather than his own leadership
and, therefore, an end to the embargo would not be in Castro's interest.
Nevertheless, who would have thought that the Berlin Wall would come down,
that the Soviet Union would collapse, or that Red China would become one of
our largest trading partners? Strange things happen in the world of
geopolitics and, therefore, it is not beyond a reasonable doubt that the
Cuban embargo that started in 1962 might very well end forty-five years
later in 2007.
Based on the hypothetical end to the Cuban embargo in the next few months,
we asked industry experts a series of questions regarding the likely
scenario to follow. Below is the consensus opinion.
Q. If the Cuban embargo were to end today, who would hold the US rights to
the major Havana brands?
A. Altadis USA (Montecristo, Quintero,Romeo y Julieta, H. Upmann, TTT
Trinidad, Por Larra
What's going to happen when the Cuban embargo ends?
There have been many stories in the press, both here and abroad, about the
intestinal problems of Cuba's 80-year-old leader, Fidel Castro. These
stories have given rise to an onslaught of letters sent to us here in North
Carolina that ask, "What's gonna happen if Castro dies?"."if the embargo
ends?". "if trademark issues stop the importation of Cuban cigars?". "if the
price of Havanas will be higher than the current cigars available?". etc.,
etc., etc.
Well, I can't answer all those letters individually... heck, I hardly have
the time to write this catalogue every other month. It ain't easy being a
cigar magnate you know, and I've got a murderous schedule as it is: Monday
night is usually football (I don't play anymore; I just watch); then Tuesday
nights, there's two TV shows I watch - one is called Heroes, which involves
a whole slew of people with super-powers, who are trying to save the world
from destruction and the other is called Friday Night Lights (which, for
some strange reason, is on TV on Tuesdays) which is about a high school
football team in West Texas. It's a serialized version of the motion picture
Friday Night Lights with Billy Bob Thornton, and it even has some of the
same actors in it). Let's see, where was I? Oh yeah! So, Wednesday night is
out because of a weekly poker game I play in.
Say? Did I ever tell you people that my grandfather was a professional poker
player? Well, he was. He came over from Russia in the early 1900s and couldn't
read, write, or speak a word of English, but he could play poker! By the
time he was in this country for 30 days, he owned two apartment buildings in
Brooklyn. No wonder Europeans thought of America as the land of opportunity!
Let's see... where was I? Oh yeah, every Thursday night, me and LaVonda go
to an Italian restaurant call L'Allegria where they don't mind us playing
Scrabble in the bar area while we eat (we used to go there on Wednesdays,
but every Wednesday they have a substitute piano player who must be half
deaf because he plays so loud that we can't hear each other's Scrabble
scores after each turn! What a freakin' nerve that guy has screwing up our
game like that). Then, Friday, it's Battlestar Galactica, by far the best
show on TV since Alias was cancelled.
So, that just leaves the weekends to answer all these e-mails and letters
about Cuba and I've spent too many years working seven days a week to devote
my weekends at this late stageof the game to the business of writing about
cigars.
If you really wanna know what I think is gonna happen when Fidel passes
away - and it could happen before this catalogue even gets printed - then
read this excerpt from Cigar Magazine that I wrote a while ago.
Frankly, anybody that's really interested in cigars should have a
subscription because it's the one and only magazine that will give you the
unvarnished truth about the cigars legally available in the United States.
Every other magazine has to worry about every period and punctuation mark
possibly alienating a potential advertiser. I can tell you for a fact that
Cigar Magazine is a magazine entirely devoted to the cigar consumer and no
one else! If manufacturers choose to advertise there, well, that's fine and
dandy. And if they choose to advertise only in magazines that play up their
cigars as being the cat's meow, well, that's their choice to make too. One
of my many tasks is to give the yay or nay on advertisements that go into
Cigar Magazine.
I've got some pretty simple rules: 1) No one is allowed to advertise a Web
site, an address, or a telephone number in an advertisement that might
compromise the name or address of a consumer who buys the magazine in a
retail tobacco shop. Doing so would harm the tobacconists that handle the
magazine. 2) The advertisements cannot make claims that industry
professionals would know to be patently false. (Example: advertising a
largevolume production cigar to contain 10- or 15-year-old tobaccos, or
hitherto undiscovered pre-embargo tobaccos. I cannot even guess how many
such ads have been denied space in CM.)
Okay already... Here's the article on Cuba (with a few touch-ups to make it
more current) that appeared in CM. At this point, no one has any idea if and
when the forty-plus-year embargo between the US and Cuba will end. Some
industry experts say that the embargo will never end as long as Fidel Castro
remains in power, citing that Cuba and its people have been economically
deprived during Castro's entire reign, and particularly hard-pressed since
the fall of the Soviet Union, which was Cuba's principal trading partner and
source of economic aid.
Proponents of this argument maintain that Fidel Castro has always had the US
embargo to blame for Cuba's economic woes, rather than his own leadership
and, therefore, an end to the embargo would not be in Castro's interest.
Nevertheless, who would have thought that the Berlin Wall would come down,
that the Soviet Union would collapse, or that Red China would become one of
our largest trading partners? Strange things happen in the world of
geopolitics and, therefore, it is not beyond a reasonable doubt that the
Cuban embargo that started in 1962 might very well end forty-five years
later in 2007.
Based on the hypothetical end to the Cuban embargo in the next few months,
we asked industry experts a series of questions regarding the likely
scenario to follow. Below is the consensus opinion.
Q. If the Cuban embargo were to end today, who would hold the US rights to
the major Havana brands?
A. Altadis USA (Montecristo, Quintero,Romeo y Julieta, H. Upmann, TTT
Trinidad, Por Larra