I liked the cigar a lot. I found it to be in the medium-mild range with a nice toasty flavor. I’ve had a box in my long-term storage for over six months and they have settled in very nicely. For me, it is a morning or after-lunch cigar.

Ed, Thy this article: http://www.cigarwatch.info/cigar-smoking-the-ritual/. I describe my approach to the ritual. Chief

However, a number of my friends who have been smoking for much longer than I have claimed that they have “discovered” a website that sells genuine Cubans. I am sure you have heard of it (puroexpress) and they sell cigars for half of going price of genuine Cubans. That alone tells me they have been buying fakes for the last two years. My closest friend is fond of the Cohiba brand and he gets at least 1 box a month from them which he splits with his neighbor. I keep trying to tell them about the limited suppliers world wide and theirs is not on that list, but they don’t want to hear it. The site they use was referred to them by a 20+ year smoker and newby like myself knows nothing.

I sent them a brief link to C/A site telling in brief how to spot a fake box and my buddy told me his boxes had all those criteria. However it did not go into depth the way was done here. This link will be forwarded to him as soon as I post this though. Neverless, I skeptically purchased a 3 pack of Montecristo No2 if for anything, try to see if I can notice any of the trademarks with the boxes and lables that you outline here.

If you have any info for that particular brand cigar and package size that I could use to inspect them when they arrive it would be of great help.

Thanks!

I started working in a smokeshop in the mid 1960’s when I was 10 and through the years I owned retail stores and imported pipes and tobaccos. Your article updated my knowledge and that’s appreciated.

It used to be easy to identify counterfeits based on construction alone but the gap has closed between the Cubans and other caribbean countries. The only cigars that appeared in my stores that I could believe (not be certain) were genuine Cubans invariably had no band and were brought in by people that had recently been in countries where they might be available (no band so that they could be brought in through customs). I can’t remember a single ‘marked’ Cuban that I saw in the States that I had any faith in being legitimate.

The worst case was a lot of several boxes of cigars that a fellow tobacconist from Minneapolis purhased in 1990 (or thereabouts) that he purchased for @$20 a box, sight unseen. They were Hoyo de Monterrey in silver tubes (pardons but I don’t remember what name was used for the size), @ 5×43. As soon as this fellow saw the cigars he had a laugh and started giving them away to his friends. I ended up with a box of machine made, hole in the tip cigars that on inspection (I cut several open rather than smoke them), apparently were all-tobacco but made with flakes. Just awful.

Regards,

Pete