Don Lino

Don Lino was founded in 1989 by Cuban-born Nestor Miranda and his wife Mariana through their Miami Cigar & Company, making it one of the few premium cigar brands launched by a husband-and-wife team during a period when the industry was flat rather than booming. Miranda named the brand after a worker at the original UST factory in Honduras where production began, and started with just 80,000 cigars a year — numbers that exploded to 12 million annually at the peak of the cigar boom by 1996. The rapid growth attracted UST's attention, which led to a bitter contract dispute that halted Don Lino production for two years and resulted in a settled lawsuit. Miranda retained ownership of the brand throughout and relaunched it in 1999, eventually moving production to the La Aurora factory in the Dominican Republic. The line in this database uses a Connecticut shade wrapper over Dominican binder and filler, cedar-room aged for three months before release, producing a consistently mild, creamy, and smooth smoke that has been a go-to value brand for decades.