From budding soccer star in fútbol-crazed Uruguay, to pawn shops and nightclubs in Miami, Litto Gomez found a home in the cigar industry. After 31 years in the game, his passion for his family business and the cigars they create is only getting stronger.
The bootstrapping of Litto Gomez starts ominously with socking a soccer official when he was a young man. Over the next 25 years, the founder and CEO of La Flor Dominicana followed a trail of discomfort that took him through pawn shops, nightclubs and liquor stores until he found his true calling in the cigar industry.
It started with some misguided teenage mayhem.
“I had it all figured out, I thought,” says Gomez, 71 years old, who founded La Flor in 1994. Born in Spain, his family migrated to Uruguay when he was a year old, and he discovered soccer. It would be a career, he decided.
“I was going to be a soccer star,” says Gomez, the youngest of three children. He quit school at 16, endeavoring to be the greatest in a sport that would yield him riches and fame. He had poor grades and saw little hope in the vocational future his school counselors suggested for him.
Soccer was next to religion in Uruguay as he grew up, with 10 stadiums that held over 10,000 fans in a country that at the time, the 70s, had a mere 2.8 million people.
He was already getting paid as a professional and things were proceeding well.
Then: “I punched out a referee,” he says.
He makes no excuses for his youthful loss of restraint. But it halted his fledgling career path on the spot. Ostracized and ousted from soccer, Gomez realized he’d have to rethink his future. The first step was a move to a more industrialized country.
Of course, he set his sights on the U.S.
“If you’re a poor kid in the third world and want to emigrate, you want to go to the U.S.,” he says. He applied for a tourist Visa to the U.S. It was 1973 and a wily immigrant could use that to get in and never leave. But he had no family in the U.S. and even in those more permissive days, a teenager from Uruguay was unlikely to have the resources to vacation in America.
He was denied.
Second best was Canada, which required no Visa.
“A couple guys from my neighborhood had gone to Toronto, and it was the only city I knew in Canada, so that’s where I ended up,” he says.
Gomez rented a room in a house, landed a job in a cabinet making factory and commuted three hours a day – two buses and a subway leg, 90 minutes each way – in the icy northern climate. The average winter temperature in Uruguay is 57 degrees Fahrenheit; in Toronto, it is 28.
“I had to get very tough in a very short time,” he says. He moved to a job as a dishwasher at an Italian restaurant closer to his apartment.
THE FIRST CIGAR
Gomez’s whirlwind upheaval, from fledgling soccer star to immigrant dishwasher, moved forward. His ambition was enough to ensure he wouldn’t wash dishes for long. He was promoted to busboy within two weeks.
“My first step was to be the best dishwasher who ever worked there,” he says. The manager noticed, and Gomez asked to be promoted to haul the dirty dishes rather than wash them.
“He moved me to busboy on a Friday and on Monday I came in with a shirt and tie on and now I am a gentleman,” Gomez says.
On the floor, he noticed that waiters were making good tips – the restaurant was fine dining and people paid good money to eat there.
Gomez wanted to be a waiter.
He told the manager, who asked that he wait until a position was available.
That happened almost immediately.
“The manager calls me in and says ‘I said that you could become a waiter, and two waiters called in sick tonight. So tonight, you are a waiter.’”
At the end of the night, sitting at the bar, the restaurant closed, the manager congratulated him on his first night, a success.
To celebrate, as Gomez walked out the door, the manager pulled out a Montecristo No. 2 and gave it to Gomez.
“He told me that night how to smoke a cigar,” Gomez says. “And that night I walked home in a very calm snow, no wind, and this was the happiest day of my life, enjoying this walk and this cigar and the accomplishment and the snow. And my life changed right there. Every time I smoke a cigar, it takes me to that night.”
COMING TO AMERICA
Weather-weary Gomez came to Miami in 1979, 25 years old, ready to start a business.
“I had saved my money,” he says.
His brother Jose was in Miami after working on cruise ships for a while.
They pooled their resources and opened a liquor store in Little Havana. Litto had acquired an understanding of the market working in the restaurant business, while Jose had some hospitality smarts.
“The extent of my knowledge was serving,” Gomez says. But Delta Liquors was a success. While many of his patrons didn’t speak English, Gomez, a native Spanish speaker and more than proficient in English, couldn’t find anyone who spoke English. He struggled with the local Spanish dialect.
“I learned to speak ‘Cuban,’” he says.
Gomez also found a haven for cigars.
“I didn’t know when I came to Miami that it was a community of cigars,” he says. “I understood that it was a tradition and there were a lot of cigar factories in Havana. But I didn’t know the whole story. I just kept enjoying my cigars.”
The store was a success, which led to another store, then a nightclub. At the height of the cocaine trade in Miami, it was an eye opener for Gomez.
“I had no idea what the nightclub business was like,” he says. “I had been a waiter, but it was a nightmare dealing with people drinking. And with this in the middle of Miami with drugs, music, dancing and it was a whole different ballgame.”
The Gomez brothers went on to buy a pawn shop, which dealt in valuable jewelry. Gomez, always curious, learned the trade and became a gemologist.
But the valuable jewels were a beacon to street criminals.
“We were closing the shop one night and two guys came in and one of them put a gun to my head,” Gomez says. They took him and several other employees into the back, tied them up, and taped their mouths shut.
“I promised that if I got out of that alive, I would be out of the business,” he says.
Gomez had no idea what he would do, but it would be a step above bars, clubs and pawn shops.
He lived. And La Flor Dominicana was born.
WELCOME TO CIGARS
Gomez had met Inez, today his wife, in the late 80s. Both were entrepreneurial, and with a new lease on life, Gomez was an open book.
As they say, ‘do what you love, and you’ll never work a day in your life.’
But what was that?
A social acquaintance suggested cigars, which had grown in importance to Gomez. They were ubiquitous in South Florida, and he was enjoying them almost daily.
“It was ridiculous,” he says of the suggestion. “It didn’t make any sense to compete with people who had been there for generations.”
But it stuck in his head as he and Inez considered their options. Finally, they took the plunge in 1994.
“Maybe because of what that first cigar had meant to me is why this idea stuck in my head. But I finally said ‘ok, this is it.’”
The early years were rocky. They recruited four Nicaraguan cigar rollers, found a tobacco supplier, and rented a small space. The first 45,000 cigars they made were “unsmokable,” he says. “I knew as a consumer that they were bad cigars, but I just didn’t know how to make them good.”
But soon, they started becoming smokable, some even better. The couple opened a factory in the Dominican Republic, and while Inez handled distribution in Miami, Gomez would go to the Caribbean every Monday and return home on Friday.
They started producing righteous cigars just in time for the cigar boom of the 90s.
La Flor’s first hit was the 2000 series, released in 1997, featuring a Cameroon wrapper over a Dominican binder and filler. Demand surged. It went from three sizes to nine in a year. Gomez had, in three short years, arrived at a blend that launched La Flor into the spotlight. He was becoming a blender.
The sudden demand for premium cigars put La Flor in a coveted spot.
“The older brands didn’t have enough tobacco, and as a new brand, we’d already been lining up suppliers,” he says. “We had cigars when everyone wanted them, while the others didn’t.”
It turned a 5% callback rate from retailers into a 100% rate.
“Every time we got a new customer, we celebrated,” Gomez says.
EXPANSION
By 1998, La Flor Dominicana was an established brand, a success story that separated itself from a pack of newcomers that flocked to cash in on the cigar boom demand and, in the process, delivered inferior cigars.
“My name as a cigar maker started to grow and tobacco suppliers that would not take my call before were starting to take them,” he says.
Gomez, with Inez and their growing number of employees, had in four years developed a considered, thoughtful menu of cigars. They bought land in the Dominican Republic, a factory, then a 120-acre farm.
“The farm was the best thing we ever did, it gave us this guarantee of consistency,” Gomez says. “It gave our brand a flavor profile you could not find anywhere else.”
The business was helped by the political and social stability in the country, which allowed them to grow with ease.
“The Dominican Republic made it easy for investors, no impediments,” he says.
Then there was the growth.
An interview asked Inez in 2000 if La Flor was content to continue as a boutique brand.
“Well, we do need to grow right now,” she said.
And innovate.
Gomez created a new cigar size, the Chisel, in the early 2000s. It was an accident.
“I was in the factory and noticed that I was chewing on a cigar and it felt very comfortable,” he says. He pulled the cigar from his mouth and it was more flattened than a usual cigar.
“I looked at it and wondered what would happen if I made a cigar like this, it felt so natural,” he says. He went straight to the rolling room and took a regular cigar and cut the sides, then handed it to a roller.
“Put a wrapper on this,” he instructed.
It looked great and smoked better. Within a year, the La Flor Dominicana Chisel hit the market and Gomez had another hit. Not long ago, he saw a chart itemizing various cigar sizes. Included on the chart was the Chisel.
“We’ve become part of history,” he says. “I never thought about seeing this shape out there like that. This is something we did. It was so great.”
SATISFACTION
Two of the four Gomez children have joined the family business. Litto Jr. works in sales while Tony is in the Dominican Republic working in packaging, factory management and anything else that needs guidance.
“I don’t believe in pushing someone into being part of something unless they are passionate about it,” Gomez says. “We are lucky enough that Tony and Litto got very excited about it.”
A daughter, now 18, is headed to college, and while he isn’t insisting on anything, “hopefully she would be a great help in distribution.”
Every day Gomez gets to work his passion, and as a refrain, he is not really working. More expansion is coming. La Flor needs more cigars, more space, enhanced production.
“It implies a lot of things that need to happen before we bring in more rollers to increase production,” he says. More managers, more hiring decisions, more delegation – “and it freaks me out,” Gomez says. “It hasn’t happened yet, and it needs to be done slowly. But we do have a back order situation. It’s something that happens every couple of years.”
When the stress looms, Gomez grabs a cigar and thinks of that snowy walk home in Toronto 50 years ago.
He hasn’t been back. La Flor Dominicans sells its cigars in Toronto and, he thinks, some day he has to relive that moment that changed his life.
“That cigar,” he says. “I became a man, an adult there. I went through a lot of hard work, but yes, someday, I would like to go back to visit.”
“But not in the winter.”
