Gispert (pronounced Hees - pairt) is the name of two brands of premium cigars, one formerly produced in Cuba for Habanos SA, the Cuban state-owned tobacco company, and the other produced in Honduras for the Franco-Spanish tobacco monopoly Altadis SA, a division of Imperial Tobacco.
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History
The Cuban Gispert cigar began production in 1940 in Cuba in the Pinar del Rio by Simón Veja Peláez, using tobacco from the Vuelta Arriba. At the beginning, all vitolas (sizes) were hand-made. The Gispert brand has traditionally been a light-bodied cigar, relatively mild in strength compared to most Cuban brands.
After the Cuban Revolution in 1959, production of the Gispert brand continued, first under Cubatabaco and then by Habanos S.A. at the Carlos Baliño factory, which also produced the El Rey del Mundo brand. Over time, sales diminished, and the original line of eleven vitolas offered in 1972 had been reduced by 1993 to a few machine-made and hand-finished, machine-made sizes. By 2003, the brand comprised just 0.1% of the total cigar exports of Habanos S.A., and only one vitola remained in production, the Habaneros No. 2. The Gispert brand was discontinued entirely by Habanos S.A. in 2005.
In 2003, Altadis began production of a new Gispert cigar in Honduras to reprise the vintage Cuban brand. It is handmade at the La Flor de Copan Cigar Factory in Honduras using an Ecuador-grown Connecticut-seed wrapper or a maduro wrapper from San Andrés, Mexico, with a mixture of Honduran and Nicaraguan filler tobacco. It is a mild-to-medium-bodied cigar.
Vitolas in the Cuban Gispert line
The following list of vitolas de salida (commercial vitolas) within the Gispert marque lists their size and ring gauge in Imperial (and Metric), their vitolas de galera (factory vitolas), and their common name in American cigar slang.