From
the charred remnants of a 1991 downtown fire, to the smoldering
end of Ernesto Rabasa’s freshly rolled corona of
today, the story of one of Sacramento’s landmark
businesses is a tale of ashes.
In this story, which began more than 60
years ago when Murray’s Garcia Y Vega smoke shop
opened on J Street, ashes have marked on the time, brought
destruction, inspiration and refuge from a Communist regime.
No one would ever know that by walking into Garcia y Vega’s
now and finding three men from Latin America- two from
Cuba, one from Colombia- puffing away, making money, thumbing
their noses at Fidel Castro and chasing off the occasional
vagrant.
But that is what’s happened since
Ricardo Aguilera read of the fire that damaged the old
Murray’s on J Street and destroyed large parts of
the historic Fabian building in the dead of night on May
29, 1991. Dating back to the 1870s, the Fabian was eventually
demolished but Aguilera- a former Lake Tahoe hotelier-
saw hope in the ashes of that fire. He would buy Murray’s,
move it to the K Street Mall and go into partnership with
two refugees from Cuba: Rabasa and Alejandro Duardo. "We
are Latin" Duardo says. "Tobacco is in our blood."
Tobacco was abundant in the Americas by the time Christopher
Columbus discovered the New World. Since then, those who
devote their lives to creating cigars from tobacco leaves
see the craft as a link to their indigenous past. No conquistador
or no-smoking law could ever take that away, Duardo says.
By the time he was 9, Duardo was rolling cigars for a
living- a lifelong love interrupted only once. That was
when the 54- year-old became one of the countless thousands
of Castro’s political prisoners. He was imprisoned
for nine years. An event that would haunt him until he
finally escaped Cuba in 1980.
Rabasa, 62, also escaped in 1994 and would
settle in Miami, work as a cigar roller as he had done
since he was 10 and eventually hook up with Duardo. Silver
haired and callused, each is able to roll 500 cigars a
day while never ceasing to draw one of their creations.
Both thought they would live the rest of their lives in
south Florida until meeting Aguilera, a Colombia native,
who had bought Garcia y Vega’s as the culmination
of a lifelong dream. When Aguilera took it over in 1994,
Garcia y Vega’s had ceased to be a real smoke shop
and had instead become a convenience store.
Within eight months, Aguilera was stocking
350 types of cigars to a collection that had dwindled
to four under the previous owners. "I had always
worked in hotels. Both in Costa Rica and Lake Tahoe, but
my father had been in the cigar business and for me it
had always held a certain romance," said Aguilera,
39. But selling name-brand cigars wasn’t satisfying
enough. So while in Miami on business shortly after buying
Garcia y Vega’s, Aguilera would begin the process
of convincing two Cuban refugees that Sacramento was where
they ought to be.
The crux of that plan was El Embargo,
a new brand of cigars the three would create and sell
on the K Street, to hotels, restaurants and by mail. The
cigars went on sale six months ago and two months ago
the two Cubans brought their cedar rolling desks and nearly
a century of combined experience to Sacramento.
The name - El Embargo - is a gentle stab
at the real embargo that keeps cigars, rum, and other
food stuffs in Cuba away from American consumers. "Here,
in Sacramento, the embargo is over," Aguilera says.
But while the tobacco leaves they buy are billed as coming
from Cuban seeds, " the embargo against Cuba forces
the makers of El Embargo to buy their tobacco from the
Dominican Republic, Ecuador and Indonesia. To turn out
the 300,000 cigars they hope to make in a year, a load
of 40,000 pounds of wrapper, binder and filler tobacco
must be purchased.
Sitting at his table in the store, or
alternating with Duardo at a portable table at the Downtown
Plaza, Rabasa is a study in concentration while at his
work - neatly stacking leaf after yellow Indonesian leaf,
cutting them, inserting filler from the Dominican Republic
and a coarse Ecuadorian binder that holds the whole thing
together as Rabasa rolls the cigar, cuts it and smoothes
it gently.
El Embargo Cigar Factory does it's distribution
without a "Middle Man", allowing them to maintain
reasonable prices. Here you can buy a high quality cigar
at down-to-earth prices. |
