Get This Fiesta Started: New Historiador & Prominente Models from Cuervo y Sobrinos

There is something to be said for the transportive power of products. I certainly don’t wear my Converse All-Stars, for example, because they are a particularly comfortable, durable sneaker. Instead, I wear them to, more likely than not, to satisfy the part of my subconscious that would like to be back in the mosh pit circa 1991.

And if I put on an orange-dialed DOXA during a beach vacation, it is not simply to wear a cool-looking, well-performing dive watch. It is also because part of me wants to elevate the snorkeling session with my 7-year-old to the pioneering heights of Jacques Cousteau and his crew backward diving off the Calypso in 1968.

Cuervo y Sobrinos is a watch brand that is all about transportive power. The company – which has launched a host of new models this year as part of its 140th-anniversary celebrations – may be headquartered in Switzerland, and it may use Swiss movements. But apart from that, it is unlike any other Switzerland-based watch brand.

With its mid-century styling – including Art Deco and Art Nouveau design touches – coupled with tobacco tones, champagne hues, and some flamboyant flashes of color, Cuervo y Sobrinos watches transport you to another place and another time. One where you can smell the cigar smoke, taste the guarapo frío, sense the hedonism, and hear the dulcet tones of Celia Cruz.

Of course, the time and place we are talking about is the pre-Castro Havana, Cuba, of the early 1950s. By then, Cuervo y Sobrinos had become one of the premier luxury names, and not just in Cuba but across Latin America. Seventy years earlier, in 1882, Don Ramón Fernández Cuervo, having migrated from Asturias in northern Spain, established a jewelry boutique in Havana along with his six nephews, or sobrinos in Spanish.
 

Over the decades, the nephews inherited control of the business, and Cuervo y Sobrinos’ cachet soared. So much so, in fact, that watch brands like Patek Philippe, Rolex, and Longines applied the boutique’s name to the dials of some of their watches as part of dual-branding initiatives. What’s more, Cuervo y Sobrinos began making its own Swiss-made watches in La Chaux-de-Fonds.
 

Having moved to increasingly larger premises, the company enjoyed its peak during the roaring 1950s. That was when sales at its boutique on Calle San Rafael reached record levels, and people like Winston Churchill, Albert Einstein, Clark Gable, Edith Piaf, and Ernest Hemingway had all passed through its doors.

However, given the shifting political landscape, some of the Cuervo family left Cuba. And eventually, in 1965, when the disparate factions from the revolution consolidated into the Communist Party of Cuba, the government nationalized the brand. It then lay dormant for three decades.

It was only at the turn of the millennium that the Cuervo y Sobrinos name was brought out of the wilderness by European backers. One of which was Italian Marzio Villa, who, as CEO, helped re-establish the brand as a Swiss watchmaker.
 

But there was a twist: Cuervo y Sobrinos, as it describes itself, is “the only luxury watch brand in the world dedicated to the celebration of Latin culture and the love of life.” It expresses this through its elegant, stylized timepieces delivered in watch boxes that can be repurposed as humidors.

And when the modern-day Cuervo y Sobrinos inaugurated its museum and boutique in Havana in 2009, it became the first international watch brand to open its own store in Cuba.
 

In 2018, the brand passed to new owners headed by CEO Massimo Rossi. And today, it operates out of its headquarters and watchmaking atelier in Capolago on the shores of Lake Lugano and its production facility in Saignelégier in the Swiss Jura.

Named for one of the largest sizes Cuban cigars come in, Cuervo y Sobrinos’ Prominente line offers lavish dress watches with generously proportioned, rectangular cases. Following on from time-and-date Clásico and Solo Tiempo models, the brand kicked off 2022 – its 140th anniversary year – by bringing out four Doble Tiempo pieces in this collection.
 

Featuring wavy-guilloche dials with large Art Nouveau numerals framed by an assertive 30.5mm by 52mm stainless-steel case, the Doble Tiempo provides two independent hour-minute displays: one 12-hour, the other 24-hour. Each display is powered by its own in-house modified, automatic ETA 2671 calibre, meaning that the wearer can display the time correctly in two different locations regardless of their UTC offset.
 

Eager to make the most of its 140th anniversary year, Cuervo y Sobrinos will steadily release more models across its eight collections over the next six months. That should give those seduced by the brand’s retro-modern style and Latin flair plenty to look forward to.

For more information, please visit the Cuervo y Sobrinos website.

(Photography by Pierre Vogel)