Nestor Plasencia

Plasencia was born on 8 October 1949 in Cuba into a tobacco-growing family and left after the revolution. He rebuilt in Central America, lost his Nicaraguan operations during the Sandinista period in the early 1980s, and expanded instead in Honduras with factories at Danli, Moroceli and elsewhere in El Paraiso before returning to Nicaragua later. The family had grown tobacco in Cuba for several generations before that.

By the mid-1990s his operations were reported to be producing around thirty-three million cigars a year for more than thirty brands, most of them under contract and unbranded from the consumer's point of view. That model, growing leaf and manufacturing for others rather than building a consumer brand, made him one of the most consequential and least visible figures in the industry.

His sons, among them Nestor Andres, took increasing responsibility as the family finally launched its own Plasencia brand in 2017. The family also produced organic-certified tobacco, unusual in a crop that normally depends on heavy field intervention. Because the family's output has largely reached consumers under other companies' names, the scale of its role in the non-Cuban industry is easy to underestimate from retail shelves alone.