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The Cuba Code and Separating True Cuban Cigars From Fakes
Cuban cigars: for a cigar aficionado, the ultimate forbidden fruit is to buy Cuban cigars. At least, that's true if you live in the United States, which has long embargoed most trade and travel with the Communist island republic, which prevents the ability to buy Cuban cigars.
Even as much of Cuba's storied cigar-making know-how has been exported to nearby countries such as the Dominican Republic, Nicaragua, and Honduras, both in the form of direct aid from the Cuban government to other countries' cigar industries at various times and in the form of top cigar-making families that have gone to live in more business-friendly climes, Cuba continues to enjoy a reputation as the source of some of the world's greatest cigars: a reputation that, by now, perhaps owes more to the inability of one of the world's largest cigar-consuming economies to verify their tastiness than to any actual superiority. (There are those who would give the nod to the cigars of, for example, the Dominican Republic, which is permitted to trade with the United States and whose wares can be bought from any halfway-decent cigar emporium.)
In any case, this forbidenness creates a high demand for Cuban cigars, one that unscrupulous (or, more sympathetically, highly enterprising) Cubans have been taking advantage of for a long time. We in the United States may sometimes worry that our government is too close to business, but we have little experience with systems where the government is business--as is the case with socialist Cuba. (Some conservatives have complained in recent months that this or that government program--a return to the top marginal tax rate of 2001, for example--represents the return of "socialism"; one wonders how these folks would fare if confronted with actual socialism.)
Such a government will only respond negatively to any form of competition, as any monopoly would do. And Cuban cigar counterfeiting represents just such competition.
Counterfeit Cuban cigars have long provided those who can't, for whatever reason, find work at the government-run cigar producers alternative (if illegal) employment at chinchals (small factories), with earnings and profits going untaxed. But in the current worldwide economic crunch the incidence of Cuban cigar counterfeiting has increased almost unbelievably. So has the seriousness with which the Cuban government takes the problem.
Reports have the Castro regime seizing a thousand boxes a month. The knockoffs, with their "Made in Cuba" stickers, sometimes go for as low as a fifth the price of a box of state-produced Cuban cigars; and they may well taste like it too.
Earlier this year (2009), in response to the booming trade in counterfeit Cuban cigars, the Cuban government introduced a special code, which would be applied to all state-made cigars (much like a Universal Product Code) and would allow buyers, especially corporate or other large buyers, to verify that they were indeed purchasing a box of genuine Cuban cigars. Cuba has long used a code system, but the codes used in previous years have repeatedly been cracked: Habanos changed the codes in 1999, for example, in response to widespread counterfeiting, though this decision met with controversy among those Cuban cigar aficionados who relied on the codes to help them figure out how long a particular box had been stored in the humidor.
The "uncrackable" new codes were hacked within a few months and distributed online, as well as reprinted after the fact in Smoke Magazine and Cigar Aficionado. This cycle repeated itself again several times, with the Cubans threatening ever more-complex and less-crackable codes in turn.
And when the Cubans made good on that threat in 2009, what was the result? The much-vaunted new box codes of spring 2009 were, predictably enough in this age of the Internet, cracked after less than two months in operation, leaving Habanos at square one.
Apparently these knockoffs are a special problem in Mexico, where tourists from the United States often find themselves attempting to chase down and buy Cuban cigars. This regional tension has led to the largest Mexican distributor of Cuban cigars to impose its own validation system on the country's shops and retailers.
"Unbreakable" codes, online chicanery, illegal cigars it's all enough to make you want to order your own discount premium cigar sampler from a reputable, United States-based company, using only those delicious cigars legally available in the United States, and leave the craziness to people who have time for it.
Until the days when you can build a discount premium cigar sampler that includes Habanos S.A. legally (and that day may well come before the end of President Obama's much-predicted second term), it's probably a good idea to stick to Nicaraguan, Dominican or Honduran cigar companies, which frequently use Cuban seeds and, for that matter, Cuban expertise to create their own enticing tastes.
About the Author CigarFox provides you the opportunity to build your own sampler of the finest cigars that include cigar brands like Montecristo, Romeo & Julieta, H Upmann, Macanudo, Cohiba, Partagas, Gurkha and many more. Choose from more than 1200 different cigars! Other cigar products include cigar humidors, cigar boxes, and cigar accessories like Zippo Lighters.
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