The Archive
The register of houses.
One entry per house, numbered as it is made, each read against real sources. What is not confirmed does not appear here.
No. 001
The House of Padrón
At the company's headquarters in Miami there is a small hammer, kept in a place of honor. It was given to José Orlando Padrón when he arrived in the United States, a Cuban exile with little else, and with it he took carpentry work until he had saved enough to begin again. The hammer is the house's real founding document.
No. 002
The House of Davidoff
In August of 1989, Zino Davidoff put more than a hundred thousand of his own cigars to the fire — Havanas bearing his name, which he had judged no longer fit to carry it. Officers of Swiss customs and representatives of Cuba's tobacco monopoly stood witness. Cuba maintained afterward that the cigars could simply have been returned and replaced; the fire said what he thought of replaced. A name, he held, is a certification or it is nothing — and the burning is the house's real warranty.