José Orlando Padrón was the founder and guiding force behind Padrón Cigars for more than five decades. Born in 1926 in the Canary Islands and raised in Cuba’s Pinar del Río tobacco region, Orlando learned the trade from the ground up. After the Cuban Revolution stripped the family of their factory, he fled to Miami with little more than determination and a small hammer given to him by a friend—the very tool he used while working odd jobs to save the $600 needed to open his first tiny cigar operation in 1964.
Orlando’s decision to source tobacco from Nicaragua in the late 1960s and move production there in 1970 was visionary. He weathered political upheaval, rebuilt after a factory fire, and built one of the most vertically integrated and respected operations in the industry. Until his passing in 2017 at age 91, Orlando remained deeply involved in every aspect of the business. His legacy lives on in the uncompromising standards of the Padrón brand and in the three generations of the family that continue to run it today.