One Uppmanship

When President Kennedy embargoed imports from Fidel Castro's Cuba last month, the Tampa cigar makers, who roll 97% of the 693 million Havanas puffed each year in the U.S., faced going out of business. Most of the 4,800 Florida cigar workers and their bosses grudgingly accepted the ban as a necessary means of choking off Castro's dollar supplies. Now that Washington has approved a legal way around the embargo, Tampa cigarmen are wondering out loud whether their industry is being uselessly sacrificed. As explained by the Treasury Department, the embargo is powerless to prevent entry into the U.S. of Cuban tobacco manufactured into cigars in any third nation or its possessions--Spain's Canary Islands, for example.

An administration spokesman said consolingly that if there is any "significant evasion of the embargo, we won't stand still for it." And so far, the only known three-cornered operation involves the makers of famed H. Uppman cigars. Before the embargo, Uppman's owners announced that they had bought six U.S.-made automatic cigarmaking machines and installed them in the Canaries.

Last week the U.S. Cigar Manufacturers Association called on the President and Congress to plug this loophole. In Tampa, more than 600 cigarmen have already been laid off. But manufacturers seemed in no hurry to follow the leader to the Canaries. Asked James J. Corral, president of the 657-man Corral-Wodiskay Cia.: "What if you establish a factory there and they change the rules of the game on you? You've lost a lot of money, that's all."

Tampa cigarmen are predicting that when their own six-month to one-year stockpile of Havana leaf runs out, their $50 million-per-year business will go up in smoke. "I don't know what these people are going to do." said Pedro Lopez, a cigar union official. Looking around a large, pungent room full of hand cigar makers, he added: "Their average age is between 45 and 60; they're not entitled to a pension, and they're too old to find jobs. I think that if they're going to let tobacco through anyway, they should for get the whole embargo."

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