Carlos "Carlito" Fuente Jr. is president of Arturo Fuente and the public face of the family company. He was born in Tampa, where grandfather Arturo Fuente started the house in 1912. After the family's Nicaraguan factory burned in 1979, Carlito and his father, Carlos Fuente Sr., rebuilt in the Dominican Republic in 1980 at Tabacalera A. Fuente in Santiago. He revived the perfecto shape with the Hemingway series in the mid-1980s and launched Don Carlos in 1986 as a tribute to his father. Carlos Sr. later said Carlito blended the house's cigars for decades. Sr. died in 2016. Carlito has run the company since.
His defining project is Fuente Fuente OpusX, released in November 1995: the first commercially successful Dominican puro with Cuban-seed wrapper grown at Château de la Fuente. Critics had said the Dominican Republic could not grow that wrapper. OpusX proved otherwise and became a collector benchmark. Fuente also rolls partner brands at the same factory, including Ashton's Dominican lines and J.C. Newman's Diamond Crown. In 2023 he broke ground on Gran Fábrica de Tabacos La Bella y La Bestia in Estelí, a return to Nicaragua. Fuente is independent of STG and Altadis. Who makes OpusX? The Fuente family, in the Dominican Republic, under Carlito.
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