Esteban Carreras’ Taken From The Devil’s Hand line of cigars have one of the more interesting backstories. I love a cigar that comes with a story behind it!
Gonzalo Puentes, who runs the Esteban Carreras factory in Estelí, Nicaragua, once worked for the Ministry of Agriculture in Cuba, predictably working on tobacco. Puentes and his colleagues were tasked with developing improved Corojo tobacco by Castro’s regime. They used a process called positive selection to select the strongest plants; for example, start with 100 plants, take the seeds from the best five, plant those seeds, and repeat a few times.
When Puentes and his team felt they had finally achieved their goal, they handed over their final report to the Castro government.
Except instead of giving the best seeds to the government, they were kept and smuggled out of the country, while less desirable seeds were handed over. Thus, they had taken the crop from the devil—Fidel Castro—and his regime.
According to Craig Cunningham, owner of Esteban Carreras, those special seeds were smuggled out of Cuba in the early 1990s and then grown in Ecuador and Nicaragua.
In 2022, Cunningham introduced Taken From The Devil’s Hand Dark Corojo. It’s a Nicaraguan puro with a dark corojo wrapper (which comes from plants that are descended from those smuggled tobacco seeds), dual binders from Estelí and Jalapa, and filler tobaccos from Condega.
At the 2023 PCA Convention, Cunningham introduced the world to a Maduro version of Devil’s Hand — Taken From The Devil’s Hand Corojo Maduro.
Maduro means “ripe” in Spanish. The ripening fermentation process has to generally be done at a higher temperature and for a longer period of time. Developing a good Maduro version of Corojo leaf is trickier than with other strains. To borrow a phrase from cooking, fermenting a Maduro Corojo has to be done “Low & Slow”.
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