CUBA: Feud With US Over Cigar Brand

By Dalia Acosta Reprint | | Print |

Dalia Acosta

HAVANA, Oct 4 1997 (IPS) - What’s in a name? Enough to start a trade war if it happens to be “Cohiba” a famous brand of Cuban cigars.

Cuba is furious at plans by the US-based General Cigar Corporation to introduce a “Cohiba” brand of its own in the United States and is threatening legal action. It already has complained to the US office for trade marks and patents .

According to Ana Lopez Garcia, director of marketing of Habanos S. A. – the company that distributes the “real” Cohibas – it is “disconcerting” that another firm is attempting to benefit from Cuba’s inability to place its cigars in the U.S. market because of Washington’s sanctyions against this country.

General Cigars Corporation, based in New York, announced it was launching the sale of its new cigars this week in Miami.

The registration of the name “Cohiba” in the United States originally took place in 1982 by the American firm Cultbro Corporation, which later ceded it to General Cigars.

Meanwhile, General Cigars registered another commercial brand under the name “Cohiba” but written in italics.

There is a precedent to the current uproar over cigar names which took place in 1989 between the Swiss tobacco company Davidoff et Cie and the Cuban state firm Cubatabaco, over the name “Davidoff.” The battle lasted a year and reached the courts in Britain and 39 other countries before it was over. In a “friendly” agreement, Cubatobacco ceded the rights to the Davidoff brand to the Swiss firm.

This kind of solution is not expected in the case of Cohiba as they are the most prestigious of all cigars produced in Cuba. They first appeared in 1966 on the initiative of President Fidel Castro who, in addition to smoking them himself, would distribute Cohibas as personal gifts. Cohibas only appeared on the open market in 1982.

Cuban authorities argue that the appearance of cigars bearing the name “Cohiba” and made outside Cuba. are a threat against the prestige of the famous cigars, but that they could never fool real connoisseurs.

“Cohibas not made in Cuba are not Cohibas,” the experts say. And they maintain the verdict is valid for other brands of Cuban- made cigars, the quality of which is related to the island’s soil and climate, the traditional methods of harvesting and drying, and the manufacture by hand.

Cohibas are made with tobacco cultivated by Alejandro Robaina, a private landowner who sells his entire harvest to the government, and who owns the best lands in the area of Vuelta Abajo, some 200 kilometers from Havana, where the highest quality leaf in Cuba is grown.

The cigars made by General Cigars lack “the main components that make Cohibas famous: Cuban leaves, tobacco and paper,” said Lopez Garcia.

The representative of Habanos S.A. added that, according to the U.S. firm, the cigars to be distributed in the United States are made with Dominican leaves, Cuban seeds, Indonesian tobacco, and paper from Cameroon.

“No doubt that product will not fool the experts – the real connoisseurs of the flavor of cigars – and, like many other imitators of our product, it is destined to fail,” said Lopez Garcia.

The boxes of Cuban cigars, that go for hundreds of dollars in any part of the world, get their highest price in New York, where a box can cost up to 700 dollars, as a consequence of Washington’s ban on Cuban imports.

The taste for Cuban cigars seems to be on the rise in the United States, according to reports received here. Last year U.S. customs confiscated boxes of Cuban cigars worth more than 1.1 million dollars.