Arturo Fuente

Cuban émigré Arturo Fuente established the brand in West Tampa, Florida, in 1912, ten years after arriving in the United States. Its original three-story wooden factory was among nearly 200 Tampa facilities importing Cuban tobacco and making finished cigars. By 1924, A. Fuente & Co. employed 500 workers, but a fire destroyed the factory late that year and halted production for 22 years.

Fuente restarted the business in 1946 on the 160-square-foot back porch of his Ybor City home. Arturo and his wife rolled cigars full-time, assisted by hired torcedores, while their sons Carlos and Arturo, Jr. helped after school. Through the 1950s, Fuente remained a local Tampa brand whose production was sold on a cash-and-carry basis.

Carlos Fuente, Sr. bought the company in 1958 for $1, taking on $1,161 in assets and no debt. After the United States embargo ended access to Cuban tobacco, Fuente worked with leaf from regions including Puerto Rico and Colombia. Rising labor costs and a shortage of qualified Florida rollers later prompted production trials in Mexico and Puerto Rico, but the resulting quality was considered inadequate. The company then moved production to Estelí, Nicaragua, where its factory was destroyed during the Nicaraguan Revolution in 1979.

The family mortgaged Carlos Fuente, Sr.'s house and moved to the Dominican Republic. Tabacalera A. Fuente opened a 12,000-square-foot factory in Santiago in September 1980. The Hemingway line followed in the mid-1980s, and by the end of that decade Fuente was growing tobacco on a substantial scale, including its own wrapper leaf. Fuente Fuente Opus X, introduced in November 1995, became the house's flagship Dominican puro. As of 2010, the Dominican factory was producing more than 30 million cigars annually.