Entrepreneurs: Legacy of Dreams

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Salvador Renteria traveled illegally across the border in the early 1960s to work in Napa. He moved up from driving stakes in the vineyards as a laborer for $20 a day to being a salaried foreman and supervisor. His son Oscar earned a college degree while learning all his father knew about vineyard management. In 1987 Salvador opened Renteria Vineyard Management, which oversees 1,500 acres of vineyard for 27 high-profile clients, employs 130 people and hauls in revenues of $8 million a year. Recently Oscar, 36, who took over the company in 1993, launched the company's own wine. "By growing grapes, there's not a lot of exposure," he says. "By making wine, you tell a story."

Sometimes the ambitions of business heirs fly far beyond anything the founders imagined. When he was rolling penny cigars on a sidewalk in early-1900s Cuba, Teorifio Perez-Carillo could not have dreamed that someday his handiwork would be legendary among Hollywood stars and other aficionados. Or that his son Ernesto would buy the building behind his sidewalk stake and turn it into a tobacco warehouse. Or that his grandson, also named Ernesto, would take over the operation in Miami and become a multimillionaire.

Ernesto Perez-Carillo Jr., 52, considers that improbable journey as he strolls among the dozen men and women sorting and rolling molasses-colored leaves in El Credito Cigars' pungent storefront in Miami's Little Havana. His father expanded production to 140,000 cigars a day, at one point supplying troops during World War II. They fled to Miami after Fidel Castro's takeover in 1959. In 1968, finally convinced the exile was permanent, the elder Ernesto paid $5,000 for a cigarmaking factory in Miami. To find a niche among the 30 or so other cigar factories, Ernesto Sr. began testing some signature brands. He developed a mail-order business to reach markets in Chicago and the Northeast, leafing through the Yellow Pages to find doctors, lawyers and other potential cigar smokers.

Though he had set out for New York City to make it as a jazz drummer, Ernesto Perez-Carillo Jr. returned to Miami when his father came down with Lou Gehrig's disease. In the midst of negotiations to sell the business, "something came over me," says Perez-Carillo. He persuaded his father to decline the offer and turn the business over to him. Ernesto Sr. died in 1980. El Credito's focus on premium lines paid off in the early '90s, gaining the company notice during the cigar boom. An article in Cigar Aficionado magazine sparked a flood of orders, causing a six-month backlog. Bill Cosby, Sharon Stone and Arnold Schwarzenegger became loyal clients, says Perez-Carillo.

The trickiest decision for immigrant business owners is often the exit strategy. Though both have worked in the business, Perez-Carillo's son Ernesto III, 22, is a recent Stanford grad and consultant, and his daughter Lissette McPhillips, 30, is a lawyer. So Perez-Carillo knew he faced a choice in 1999 when tobacco company Swedish Match offered to buy El Credito for a reported $20 million. He sold. "Most people would have thought, Millions and millions of dollars--this is my dream, my dream has come true," says McPhillips. But for her father, "there was a sadness there." Perez-Carillo now works for General Cigar, a subsidiary of Swedish Match, and still runs El Credito in Miami.