Flor de Florez

Flor de Florez is a family brand with roots in Cuba's Santa Clara region, where Senor Carlos Flores Sr. learned to roll cigars from his parents on the family's tobacco plantation. When the political situation in Cuba became untenable in the early 1960s, Flores fled to Miami and simply kept rolling, producing cigars at his kitchen table among fellow Cuban expatriates in what would become Little Havana. The cigars built a quiet, loyal following in Miami long before the brand reached national attention. When Carlos Flores Jr. brought the line to market more broadly in the mid-1990s, the Miami Selection, a blend of Ecuadorian wrapper over Brazilian, Honduran, and Nicaraguan filler with a Mexican binder, became the brand's calling card. The Cabinet Selection, a Nicaraguan puro, followed as a more refined offering.
The brand's history has not been without turbulence. A dispute with their distribution partner in the late 1990s resulted in the blend being appropriated for a competing line, a legal battle that Carlos Jr. ultimately won but that disrupted the brand's momentum for years. He eventually revived the Flor de Florez name and reintroduced the Miami Selection using the original formula. The database captures the brand at two distinct moments in its history, the Miami Selection with its multi-country construction and the all-Nicaraguan Cabinet Selection, both representing different expressions of what this family built from a kitchen table in Miami.