Key West—America’s Original Cigar City

Above, the Cigar City USA store in Key West. Photo by Armand Vaquer.

Two years ago, I stopped in at the Cigar City USA store in Key West, Florida to pick up a few Oliva cigars before our cruise continued on down to Havana, Cuba.

While there, I chatted a bit with the store's owner, Mark Cesani about cigars and his cigar store Indian. I posted a blog about the visit.

This morning, I found that Key West was once known as Cigar City USA, not just the name of a cigar store. Cigar Aficionado posted an article on the history of cigar-making in Florida, focusing on Tampa and Key West.

They begin with:

Tampa’s Cigar City Brewing has won numerous awards and gold medals, and you can order its draft beers at bars all over Key West. While the beers are quite tasty, the irony of this libation is lost on most visitors. While Tampa’s Ybor City, a neighborhood rich in Cuban American traditions, is known as America’s cigar industry epicenter, the earlier version of Cigar City, U.S.A. was not Tampa, but rather the nickname for Key West, the southernmost point in the nation. At its height in 1890, there were at least 80 factories and estimates of cigars hand rolled here run as high as 100 million annually.

To read more, go here.