Litto Gomez
Former jeweller who founded La Flor Dominicana with his wife Ines and became one of the few Dominican makers growing his own high-priming filler.
Gomez came to cigars from the jewellery trade in the mid-1990s, starting a brand called Los Libertadores with his wife Ines Lorenzo-Gomez and renaming it La Flor Dominicana after the flower of the tobacco plant. The company began small and grew through the boom and the shakeout that followed it, eventually settling into a factory at Tamboril outside Santiago. Neither founder came from a tobacco family.
His defining choice was agricultural. From 2006 he bought farmland in the Dominican Republic and began growing his own filler and wrapper, most visibly at the La Canela property, which allowed him to build blends around high proportions of ligero at a time when most Dominican cigars were positioned as mild. The Ligero and Double Ligero lines are the direct result.
He also introduced the Chisel, a format with a flattened, blade-like head that has been widely copied. Gomez continues to run the company with his family. His birth year and early biography are inconsistently reported and are omitted here. The combination of a non-tobacco background, an owned farm and a deliberately strong house style makes him an outlier among Dominican manufacturers, most of whom built on inherited operations.