Portraits: Litto Gomez
Very rarely seen without his signature hat, Litto Gomez of La Flor Dominicana embodies everything there is to love about tobacco, and the history of his brand is as interesting as he is.
After being robbed while working as a jewelry maker in 1993, Litto Gomez went to work in the cigar business with a small company named Los Libertadores in the Dominican Republic.
Unfortunately, there was a falling out with the partners in the business, and Gomez left in 1996 to start his own company with his wife, Ines Lorenzo-Gomez, La Flor Dominicana. Starting out with only five rollers producing about 150,000 cigars a year, the companies output was more than 3 million by 1997 and is now well past that mark.
Polite to a fault, extremely good natured and almost always smiling, Litto Gomez is more than willing to talk for extended periods of time about tobacco in general, or the Dominican Republic in detail.
Brooks Whittington
I have worn many hats in my life up to this point: I started out as a photojournalist for the Dallas Morning News and the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, then transitioned to photographing weddings—both internationally and in the U.S.—for more than a decade. After realizing that there was a need for a cigar website containing better photographs and more in-depth information about each release, I founded my first cigar blog, SmokingStogie, in 2008. SmokingStogie quickly became one of the more influential cigar blogs on the internet, known for reviewing preproduction, prerelease, rare, extremely hard-to-find and expensive cigars, and it was one of the predecessors to halfwheel, which I co-founded.
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