| Quintero | |
| Producttype: | Cigar |
| Currentowner: | Imperial Brands |
| Producedby: | Habanos S.A. |
| Country: | Cuba |
| Related: | Cohiba Montecristo Romeo y Julieta |
| Footnotes: | Carcinogenicity: IARC group 1 |
Quintero is a cigar brand owned by British conglomerate Imperial Brands. The cigars are produced in Cuba by Habanos S.A., a state-owned tobacco company.
The Quintero cigar brand was created as Quintero y Hermanos or Quintero and Brothers, when AgustÃn Quintero and his four brothers opened a small cigar factory in the town of Cienfuegos, Cuba in 1924 and began producing a handmade cigar.
Quintero is popular in Cuba and in Spain. By the 1940s, Quintero y Hermanos had opened a larger rolling factory in Havana, and had begun using prime tobaccos from the Vuelta Abajo region.
It the early 1960s, after Fidel Castro nationalized the Cuban cigar industry,[1] Quintero became a primarily machine-made cigar, and most of the handmade sizes were dropped in favor of machine-made or hand-finished cigars using short filler tobaccos. For many years, Quintero was the only Cuban machine-made brand to be globally marketed by Habanos SA.
In 2002, as part of a marketing strategy to promote Cuban cigars, the Cuban government marketing organization, Habanos S.A. chose to discontinue machine-made cigars in favor of handmade versions.