A Cigar Family's Charitable Trust

A Cigar Family's Charitable Trust

What you see when you drive the dirt road to Chateau de la Fuente, the tobacco plantation of Arturo Fuente Cigars, looks like a dream vision. A pristine yellow-and-white complex rises from an uncultivated field with a primary school (through 11th grade), medical clinic, laboratory, pharmacy, multiuse community center, baseball stadium, basketball and volleyball courts, and more. At this writing, the Arturo Sandoval School of Music was slated to open in fall 2008. The Cigar Family Charitable Foundation built this rural miracle.

In 1992, when Carlos Fuente Jr. (Carlito) and his father, Carlos Fuente, bought these cow pastures, they were nothing but mud; the road was nearly impassable. Ragged children would run alongside the car and beg, an activity that continued right up until 2004, when the Fuente family charity and the Newman family, their distribution partners in the United States, built this complex.

Since 2001 additional donations have been received, including a bus from Metro Bus Company, a communal kitchen from a well-known restaurant group, and a baseball stadium, sponsored by Marvin Shanken, publisher of Cigar Aficionado. In a country where litter is omnipresent and schools characteristically are dirty and scrawled with graffiti, this one has still looks brand-new, with landscaping as attractive as that of a gated, residential community. The school houses 448 students, and will be adding a 12th grade.

The Foundation's generosity extends to the community, with an astounding litany of outreach projects already completed: construction of clean-water stations; extension of electricity to homes, new bridges over rivers; new sanitation programs; repairs to existing community health facilities and schools; nutrition, prenatal, and preventative medicine programs.

Unlike many other organizations, 100% of every dollar contributed goes directly to the charitable projects. The Fuentes and Newman families underwrite all administrative, legal, accounting, office, and marketing costs.

Carlito Fuente is a deeply caring, sensitive, and sincere person, who transmits his intensity, energy, passion, and dreams to those he encounters. "There is no greater love than that of family," Carlito says ardently. Now he has an extended family with two branches—his cigar family of friends and associates, who have helped make all this possible, and the children and families within some 11 communities who consider him their beloved patriarch.