From the Archive  ·  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.