Quesada Cigars, formally known as MATASA, is a family-owned factory based in the Dominican Republic that specializes in the manufacture of premium cigars. It is best known brand is the Quesada, Casa Magna, Heisenberg & Fonseca line of cigars. Its current president and owner is Manuel "Manolo" Quesada, Jr. History Quesada family The Quesada family has been a part of the tobacco world for over a century. When they first arrived in Cuba from Spain they were bakers. It was in the late 1800s that they began their tobacco business when a debt to the family was paid with tobacco. Antero Gonzales and his brother Constantino started a leaf purchasing company, working as tobacco brokers. At the beginning of the century the brothers split ways and established separate companies and became the two largest exporters of Cuban tobacco, from Cuba to international markets. They have been competing in the world market ever since through several generations. A daughter of Antero Gonzalez married a man named Agustin Quesada, who worked his way up the ranks and ultimately too over the brokerage. These would be the parents of a boy named Manuel Quesada, who was in turn the father of Manuel Quesada, Jr. — the current head of MATASA. In 1929, in searching for new and different tobaccos, the Quesada family arrived in the Dominican Republic for the first time. They discovered new tobacco strains there, which were sold profitably to European companies for the manufacture of cigars and cigarettes. While some of its tobacco continued to come from the Dominican Republic, the company remained based in Havana, Cuba. Exile The Cuban Revolution of 1960 forced the Quesada family into exile, with Manuel Sr. taking the family, including his 13-year-old son Manolo, to a new life in Santiago in the Dominican Republic. Here Manuel Quesada y Gonzalez bought warehouses and established a new tobacco brokerage in 1961, called Manipuladora de Tobaco. Manolo was sent to attend high school in Miami. Following completion of his high school studies, Manolo went to work in the family business, where part of his job entailed smoking the various varieties of tobacco so as to better describe them to prospective customers. This led Manolo to become interested in the art of tobacco blending and the idea of becoming a manufacturer of cigars himself. Manolo Quesada became close to a small scale customer of his family's, Juan Sosa,