Miami cigar maker Jose Montagne has been fighting for more than a decade to protect his catchy Cuban brand name, Guantanamera, from Cuban government trademark lawyers.
However, a recent warming in US-Cuban relations could be the death knell of US cigar makers like Montagne who are seeing their legal position erode as they brace for the potential invasion of Cuban cigars into the world’s most lucrative cigar market.
A Cuban exile who came to the US in 1996, Montagne is one of more than a dozen cigar makers in the US that Cuba’s state-owned tobacco company has tried to block from using names referring to the communist-run island.
Photo: Reuters
Montagne, who began making his cigars in Central America in 1997, maintains that Cuba’s government cannot monopolize all things Cuban, adding that Guantanamera is a popular song both for those living on the island and worldwide.
“This isn’t about money, it’s about who we’re fighting,” said the 50-year-old exile, who sports a pale pink polo shirt and a white Panama Jack hat.
Cuban cigars have been sought after around the world since the island’s natives presented dried tobacco leaves to Christopher Columbus more than five centuries ago. In the US, they have taken on a coveted, forbidden-fruit status since a US trade embargo outlawed their import a half century ago.
The consumer magazine Cigar Aficionado has estimated that the US premium cigar market alone is worth as much as US$2.6 billion, with Cuba hoping to snap up between 25 and 30 percent of that if and when the trade embargo is eventually lifted.
To that end, Cuba has strenuously sought to block Cuba-inspired trademarks from being registered in the US.
Cuba’s legal push hotted up when Spanish tobacco giant Altadis, now a subsidiary of Britain’s giant Imperial Tobacco, purchased a 50 percent stake in Cuba’s state-owned cigar company Habanos S.A. in 2000, according to Montagne’s attorney, Frank Herrera.
In 2012, it successfully blocked Kansas City-based Xikar Inc from registering the name Havana Collection for a line of US$300 cigar cutters made in France and decorated with pieces of Cuban cigar bands and box art.
“Habanos claimed we were causing confusion about the origin of the product,” Xikar chief executive Kurt Van Keppel said. “Nobody was confused whether this was made in Cuba. We advertised them as made in Paris.”
Xikar is not the only case. The Cohiba, Cuba’s most famous brand created by former president Fidel Castro in 1962, has been at the heart of a 16-year-long battle between the Cuban government and rival Swedish Match that holds the trademark for a Dominican-made Cohiba sold in the US.
In February, the US Supreme Court ruled in favor of Cuba’s cigar monopoly when it declined to hear an appeal of a lower court decision favoring the island’s exclusive claim to the Cohiba brand.
The move sent the matter back to the US Patent and Trademark Office that could finally decide who receives the trademark.
Imperial spokesman Alex Parsons said in an e-mail that Cuban state-owned Habanos “will take appropriate action to protect its intellectual property.”
Cuba’s New York attorneys say the legal strategy is designed for the day when Cuba can sell its cigars in the US.
“Thousands of US companies have registered ... intellectual property in Cuba in anticipation of the day when they will be able to sell their products there. Cuban companies are doing exactly the same thing,” said Michael Krinsky, a partner with Rabinowitz, Boudin, Standard, Krinsky & Lieberman.
Cuba has already begun to penetrate the US market, using its European partner to churn out Cuban brand cigars made with non-Cuban tobacco, legally using the same names as its top domestic brands, such as Montecristo and Romeo y Julieta.
As a result, when the trade embargo ends, US consumers could find themselves being offered multiple products: a pricier original Romeo y Julieta from Cuba, alongside a more affordable non-Cuban variety.
Montagne filed a US trademark for his Guantanamera brand in 2001. Habanos quickly launched its own brand of the same name a year later in Germany, according to legal documents.
The name Guantanamera is as Cuban as it gets, referring to the island’s best-known patriotic song, inspired by the poetry of its independence hero, Jose Marti.
The tune was popularized in the 1960s by US folk singer Pete Seeger and has since become known worldwide.
However, judging by recent legal history, that may not suffice to beat Cuba in court.
MAJOR BENEFICIARY: The company benefits from TSMC’s advanced packaging scarcity, given robust demand for Nvidia AI chips, analysts said ASE Technology Holding Co (ASE, 日月光投控), the world’s biggest chip packaging and testing service provider, yesterday said it is raising its equipment capital expenditure budget by 10 percent this year to expand leading-edge and advanced packing and testing capacity amid strong artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing chip demand. This is on top of the 40 to 50 percent annual increase in its capital spending budget to more than the US$1.7 billion to announced in February. About half of the equipment capital expenditure would be spent on leading-edge and advanced packaging and testing technology, the company said. ASE is considered by analysts
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy
Huawei Technologies Co’s (華為) latest smartphones carry a version of the advanced made-in-China processor it revealed last year, results from an independent analysis showed. This underscored the Chinese company’s ability to sustain production of the controversial chip. The Pura 70 series unveiled last week sports the Kirin 9010 processor, research firm TechInsights found during a teardown of the device. This is a newer version of the Kirin 9000s, made by Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp (SMIC, 中芯) for the Mate 60 Pro, which had alarmed officials in Washington who thought a 7-nanometer chip was beyond China’s capabilities. Huawei has enjoyed a resurgence since
IMPROVEMENT EXPECTED: The company holds a cautiously optimistic view about this year, an official said, adding that an increase in wafer shipments is predicted United Microelectronics Corp (UMC, 聯電) yesterday reported its weakest quarterly net profit in three years, which it attributed to a prolonged inventory correction. However, the company said it expects wafer shipments to grow about 3 percent this quarter as demand from communication and computer segments is to pick up from last quarter. Net profit plunged 35.4 percent to NT$10.46 billion (US$321.6 million) in the first quarter of the year, compared with NT$16.18 billion a year earlier, making it the worst quarterly performance since the first quarter of 2021. On a quarterly basis, net profit declined 20.8 percent from NT$13.2 billion, the Hsinchu-based