Hava Cigar Shop and Lounge - Galveston, Texas

Don't Call It A Comeback
from Hava Cigar Shop and Lounge

Thank you.



These two words just don't seem to properly express my gratitude, but they have become a very common refrain in my day-to-day discussions with friends, family, vendors and customers.


While the last few weeks have been very tough, these discussions have buoyed our hopes and hardened our resolve.


The most common questions I receive are "Are you going to re-open?" and "When are you going to re-open?" I like the assumptive nature of the latter.


The answer to both, for now, is indefinite.


The Monday after the storm, I drove to Galveston with a four-part recovery plan scribbled on a legal pad. When I arrived and surveyed the damage....the list got a lot longer.


We have accomplished a great deal in 27 days.

- We recovered almost 16k of our 57k inventory.
- We saved Chief Hava and the other wooden indians.
- We recovered our point of sale and accounting systems.
- We established a temporary humidor.
- We have resumed sales through hand-to-hand and mail order transactions.
- We completed the clean-up and tear-out of the store.
- We have funded our short-term capital requirements.


Our plan is to re-build and re-open, but a lot of things will have to fall in place for this to happen.


Our landlord has filed an insurance claim for the damage to the building and permanent fixtures. I was very surprised by the time it took to get an adjuster to review the claim, and even more surprised by the 30-45 day estimate to fund the claim. Once this occurs, we will open discussions with our landlord to determine how much of our leaseholder improvements can be replaced.


The next step will be to secure funding to replace furniture, fixtures and inventory. Early reports indicate that the much-discussed SBA Disaster Recovery Loan and EIDL will not be as easily secured as many business owners are being led to believe. We are also in a holding pattern to determine how much of the 350 million business recovery dollars, sought an approved by Congress, will actually make its way to small businesses owners. I'm not holding out too much hope.


As challenging as the first two hurdles may seem, our most significant concern is the short-term economic environment in downtown Galveston. This seems to be, among downtown merchants, the universal barrier to recovery. What is the likelihood of returning to pre-Ike revenues? Will the housing situation and the closure of Texas A&M Galveston make it impossible to find employees?


So...we are moving forward. Every day, we focus on the path directly in front of us...holding out hope that everything will fall into place.


I can't wait to raise a glass and share a smoke with you at our next event. In the meantime, keep us in mind when you need some smokes...Charlie delivers.

After the Storm
from Hava Cigar Shop and Lounge

After navigating a disorganized Galveston County and welcoming Galveston Police checkpoint, I arrived in Galveston on Monday night. My first impression was one of controlled chaos. I travelled over the causeway past piles of debris that included boats, household appliances and a bloated dog corpse. It felt like a war zone; an occupied territory.

Only two days after the storm, I noted the progress that was already being made. Debris was everywhere, but it had been industriously moved to the side of the road. Stop signs had been set up at key intersections. Governmental resources were everywhere. State and National Guard troops, in their crisp BDUs and HUMVees were only outnumbered by the ubiquitous reporters and their news trucks.


Most of this activity seemed to be centered on the Galveston County Justice Center. A FEMA trailer had been set-up in the parking lot and law enforcement vehicles, from near and far, seemed to be on a continuous ingress and egress loop.


As I traveled down Broadway, I thought how timely the demolishing of the Taco Bell had been. Galveston Furniture’s inventory most likely fared well due to their preparations. Now I understand the concrete tombs in Galveston cemeteries. These are the random thoughts that go through your mind.

The wind had fell the canopy of one of the fuel stations, and one of the rickety burrito joints had fallen apart, but despite the evidence of damage strewn all around, there wasn’t much immediately apparent damage to the buildings on Broadway.
There was a very large tree lying across three-fourths of 21st Street that I had to navigate. To the merriment of the rag-tag bunch on the corner, it looked like the Cabana and Albatross seemed to be fairing well under their inspections despite the fact that Doc wasn’t present to serve up a ‘cold one’. The mid-section of the cedar arbor in front of the County Building had burned to the ground, but the men attending to it seemed to be making short work of the cleanup.

The Martini Theatre, long boarded-up, was laid bare. I saw the antique concession equipment in its lobby for the first time. The pithy comments hastily painted on the plywood still attached to other building’s window openings made for an interesting read; even more so knowing the merchants that had likely written them.

As I came up to the corner of Postoffice and 21st, it got personal. Bob’s Grocery was wiped out. How many thousands of sundry items had he lost? Like Oscar the Grouch, he always seemed able to pull what you were looking for from under his counter. What a tragedy. To my amazement, crews were already hard at work in their remediation efforts at the Stork Club and Paco’s. Both businesses were totaled by the bay-side storm surge.

After removing the sandbags that had been placed in front of our door through a great deal of, what were ultimately futile, efforts, I opened our front doors. The smell hit me like a punch in the face. The reality of the damage hit harder, just a little bit lower, in the center of my chest. I couldn’t move at first. I stood there taking it all in. The plans I had been making over the weekend, to remediate and recover, suddenly seemed insufficient.

I have a ritual of entering the store after an absence and viewing things from a customer’s perspective. My sense memory betrayed me. My normal clockwise stroll around the lounge to straighten picture frames and wipe away smudges on the furniture was impeded by random objects that had floated on the flood waters and settled in the entry way. Humidors, cigarettes, cigar boxes, plants and mud, lots of mud, filled the space. To my left, I noticed that the lockers had detached from their wall anchors and split under their own weight. Our leather couches and chairs were destroyed. Our cooler had been overturned and spilled its contents beneath itself. Water had penetrated the double-pained humidor glass and rocked like wave as I opened the sliding doors.

Fortunately Charlie had removed more than half of the cigars in the humidor, so the bottom four rows of shelves were empty, with the exception of the random box of bay-water soaked cigars that had settled on them. I immediately noticed that the boxes he had placed on the top two shelves seemed safe. I walked out of the humidor looking for signs of a flood line. There it was, across the face of the clock behind the register. The water had neatly split across the latitude of 9 and 3. Across the room, a similar line was visible on the LCD panel.

The point-of-sale was eerily in place, but based on the flood line had clearly been submerged. I wished we had removed the expensive computer and audio-visual components, but who could have guessed that the rising water would reach this level so far from the pier?

To my left, the accessories counter was overturned. Thousands of dollars of lighters and cutters had spilled out onto the floor like an aficionado’s cornucopia. I thought of the additional inventory contained within.

The door to the storage area was rendered impassable, so I left the store to enter from the rear of the building. It was then, that I noticed the damage to the Gold Star and Rosie’s for the first time. I couldn’t imagine what island venues would ultimately substitute for their colorful clientele.

The back door was similarly bloc1ked by sandbags that had been stacked in vain. The locks, polluted with sand and salt, were difficult to open. I feared my key would break. After a few minutes, I was able to cajole the lock into submission and the door was navigable. I almost wished it had not. The smell, in the dark, brick and concrete-lined room was foul beyond belief.

One of our customer’s cabinet humidors, which we had a local carpenter painstakingly restor a few weeks earlier, had come to rest on the sink. I began to move it, using great care, but realized how ridiculous the endeavor was just as the water damaged wood gave way and it dropped out of my hands splashing mud, and what I suspected was infectious sewage, all over the front of my clothing.
The room looked like it had been hit by a tornado. One by one, I recognized the items and tried to recall where they had been when I last saw them. At this point I had to stop my internal accounting of the value of these items. The number was beginning to overwhelm me.

I opened the door of the escaparate. Due to the darkness of the room, lit only by the light from the door, the only thing I could make out was the dozens of rounds of our exclusive Camacho cigars, expanded to twice their normal ring-gauge by the water. I thought of the dog on the causeway.

After a few minutes, my eyes dilated and I was able to see the top shelf. It was completely packed with boxes of cigars; each well above the water line. I thought about the effort Charlie and Stella had made to move the inventory much higher than any of us imagined necessary. I was thankful.

I pulled down a box of Double Ligero DL-660s, thinking about our ill-fated La Flor Factory Event that had been scheduled to occur the following Friday; they were in perfect condition thanks to the post-storm humidity and moderate weather.
I inhaled the aroma from the foot of the cigar directly into my nostril; it displaced all of my other senses. I ceremoniously peeled the cap off of the end of the cigar and lit it. I stood there, in that damp and dank room, smoking my cigar and began to cry for the first time in more than ten years.

Next Update: Picking Up The Pieces

An Open Letter To Our Customers
from Hava Cigar Shop and Lounge

We are going to Galveston tomorrow. I have tried to prepare myself for what I will find, but I know that I am not able.

This is usually the time in the week where I sign into my remote network and update the week's financials. Every week since February 2006, the ritual has been rewarding. Within the cells of the spreadsheets, and in every line of the financial statements, there was hope.

Our customer list grew every week. Each name representing a new relationship. Our inventory grew with product from an ever growing list of vendors, each representing a shared confidence in our future.

In 2006, no one gave us a chance. Almost daily I would hear about other merchants betting against us. "I don't get it," some would say. "All you sell is cigars?," they would ask. "You should turn this into a bar."

We sold $17.80 our first full day. Many days like this would follow, but we hung in there. We listened to our customers. We developed an appreciation for the hand-crafted cigar one customer, one relationship, at a time.

We hired some of the best employees working on the island. They were young, hard-working and as passionate about our vision as we were. They built our business with us. They were Aggies. They were our family.

It was fate that I became involved with the store in the first place. When my best friend from college invited me to Galveston to see the cigar store that he and Charlie were building, I thought....this probably won't last, but hey...I can get cigars at cost.

When his other business interests made continuing in the business impossible (two weeks after they had opened) he and Charlie asked me to step in. There were a million reasons to decline, but I knew that this might be my only chance to pursue my entrepreneurial dream....so I dove in. I set clear expectations...I live in Austin. I can only be in Galveston one weekend a month. I can help with the administration and management, but I can't function in a day-to-day capacity.

That lasted about three weeks.

Every time I stepped into the empty store, with sparsely stocked shelves and no decor...I saw the future. I knew where every piece of furniture would be placed. I could see the rugs and the pictures on the wall. I saw a room filled with customers, walls lined with lockers and shelves lined with open boxes of beautiful cigars.

It filled in slowly. We didn't borrow. Every month's profit was used to purchase one item at a time...a little more inventory, a few rugs, a few pictures, a new chair. We worked almost 60 hours a week, and we paid ourselves nothing.

We had a few rough spots. The retail business isn't easy. We learned about January and February's seasonality the hard way our first year. In Galveston, December's invoices don't get paid with January's revenue.

The cigar business has to be the toughest of all retail businesses. Let's face it, the tobacco industry is vilified. Every month, there is a new enemy at the gates. The taxes. The smoking ordinances. The health 'Nazis'. We spent every day spent knowing that the future was less secure for a retail tobacconist.

I understand the trend. I detest cigarettes; they are a disgusting nicotine delivery device...but a cigar is different. I don't need to explain this to you, because as your tobacconists we have developed this knowledge; an appreciation for the magnificence of the cigar. We traveled with you to Honduras where you experienced first hand the craft and labor that goes into a cigar.

We held the precious seedlings in our hands. We walked through the manicured fields. We inhaled ammonia in the curing barns. We felt the heat coming off of the 'pilons'. We laughed with the 'torcedores' that hand-roll every cigar and were awed by their dexterity and skill. We shared meals with the families that fled Cuba and built businesses that provide a decent living to thousands.

Tobacconist. Many people hear me declare the title and wonder aloud if it is even a word. Again, you do not need a definition. It is a dying profession. You may know Charlie is a barber. He used to jest that he was the 'youngest old barber' still around. Like the barber, the tobacconist is a symbol of a dying era. An era of town squares. An era before 'big box' stores. An era of moderate and responsible appreciation of tobacco.

The cigar store, like the barber shop, was a man's 'second home'. A tobacconist knew his customer's 'smoke'. He moderated local political discussion. He enabled the networking of businessmen. He shared the joy of the birth of your first child. He presided over the intimate wakes for those that had passed.

I may have shared with some of you thoughts of my father. I did not know him well. He was old when I was born, and died too soon. Like my grandfather, he was a cigar smoker. In fact, they smoked horribly constructed, cheap cigars, but I remember them and their aroma most vividly. I remember the bundles in the bottom of the tackle and tool boxes, hidden from the women who would destroy them.

I remember the circle of chairs where 'the men' would talk into the late hours of the night. If I didn't speak, and fetched the occasional Coors, I could stay close at hand...and absorb my the lessons of manhood. I learned that rain watered the fields and that the fields were a livelihood. I learned that a job at the plant was a noble endeavor. I learned that neighbors helped neighbors who had experienced 'a run of bad luck'. I learned which men in the community 'just weren't right' and which were 'good for nuthin'. I learned a little about women, but not as much as I had believed. I learned about the space between a handshake and the sanctity of 'your word'.

I bought my first cigar from Chad Chadbourne of Emerson's tobacco in Norfolk, Virginia after reading this poem on a Sunday afternoon in 1991:

CRIMSON
Chicago Poems, Carl Sandburg

CRIMSON is the slow smolder of the cigar end I hold,
Gray is the ash that stiffens and covers all silent the fire.
(A great man I know is dead and while he lies in his
coffin a gone flame I sit here in cumbering shadows
and smoke and watch my thoughts come and go.)

I think of how ridiculous I must have looked strutting through the Military Circle mall with a 9 inch cigar clinched between my teeth, clouds of smoke and disgusted shoppers in my wake.

In the past few years, I have called upon that moment, the instant I fell in love with cigars, every time things seemed rough at the store. I call on that memory now to sustain me.

I am not sure what the future holds for Hava Cigar Shop and Lounge. In one future, I see the business restored. I see my teenage daughters helping a customer in the humidor and ringing sales at the register. I see Charlie nodding off in a chair, oblivious to his surroundings....waking up every few minutes looking for a customer to share a story with.

In the other, I see the difficulty ahead and the chance that the 'dream' that was our business.... faded away in the aftermath of the storm.

I'll focus on the former....and the thoughts of my fathers; on the pride that they would surely feel if I were in their 'circle of men' holding a smoldering cigar.

Our thoughts are with you and your families.