Karen Berger Cigars

Three generations and three countries, and each time tobacco is what remains. Max Berger fled Poland from Hitler in the 1940s and stopped in Cuba, where he set up a factory in Pinar del Río. The revolution drove him out in turn; he left for the United States in the 1960s, with his son, and decided to be done with tobacco. The son, Enrique — Kiki — did not follow that advice.

In the 1990s, when the American cigar market took off, Kiki Berger went to Nicaragua, bought land and opened a factory in Estelí, the Tabacalera Estelí, with a two-hundred-acre farm beside it, the Vegas. That is where the house still is. It is also the factory of Cuban Crafters, the Little Havana shop and brand in Miami that Kiki co-owned, and whose entry this atlas carries: the two houses come out of the same workshop.

Karen is Nicaraguan, from Estelí itself. At eighteen, a business student, she took a job as a roller in a factory in town to pay for her studies. The factory was Kiki Berger's. They married, worked together, and when he died, in 2014, at fifty-six, it was she who took over — the factory, the farm, the shop in Daytona Beach. She is, the trade says of her, the only woman to own and run a cigar house end to end, from the land to the counter.

She first widened the Don Kiki range, from four blends to six. Then, in 2016, she signed her own: K by Karen Berger, on tobacco from her own farm. The trade named her Tobacco Businesswoman of the Year in 2021.

Range Depth

• Don Kiki

  Wrapper Undisclosed · Strength Medium-Full

  The founder's brand. Four blends at his death in 2014, six since.

• K by Karen Berger

  Wrapper Habano and Maduro · Strength Medium

  Signed in 2016, on tobacco from her own farm.