The Kid Who Rolled Cohibas: The Long Road of Don Pepín García

José García was eleven years old in December 1961 when he started working in a cigar factory in Báez, a tobacco town in Cuba's Villa Clara province. The factory belonged to an uncle; tobacco belonged to the whole family. Everyone called the boy Pepín.

By 1963 he was at the Félix Rodríguez export factory in Báez, where he would work for nearly four decades. The cigars that passed through his hands wore the most famous bands on earth: Montecristo, Cohiba, Romeo y Julieta, Ramón Allones. Cuba trained him, graded him, and never printed his name on anything.

In 2001 he left, first for Nicaragua, then Miami. In 2002, in a small room on Calle Ocho in Little Havana, he and his family started a factory with a defiant name: El Rey de los Habanos, the King of the Habanos. It sat next door to El Credito, the storefront where the non-Cuban La Gloria Cubana had been born a generation earlier.

The industry found him fast. In 2003 he rolled the first Tatuaje cigars for a young brand owner named Pete Johnson, and the boutique cigar boom suddenly had its signature maker. The little factory's dozen master-level rollers turned out hundreds of thousands of cigars a year, every one bearing the Cuban-style triple cap Pepín had learned as a boy.

The lesson of Pepín is patience on a scale Americans find hard to imagine. He was over fifty when he started his first company. The forty years before that were not a delay. They were the blend.