Back at the Arturo Fuente factory in Santiago, and the Opus X Room

This is where it started. He went into the Arturo Fuente factory in Santiago, in the Dominican Republic, in 1995, the year the first Fuente Fuente Opus X came out. In the Opus X Room, in his words, he spent “more of an Decade making the very famous FFOX cigar.”

On a Friday in February 2020 he went back and posted from the factory: “This is not a cigar factory anymore… This is an Museum, School, & University.” In the first pictures of that post, he wrote, he is sitting at his old chair in the Opus X Room — “a very emotional time for me.”

The rest is the factory as visitors see it now: a courtyard with a fountain and palms, rows of rollers at their tables on two floors, wooden corridors, old cigar presses, murals — one of them a Hublot watch beside Opus X art — and a group of visitors with headsets walking a red-carpeted corridor.