Henry Clay is an American
brand of
cigars named after the early American politician
Henry Clay.[1] The cigars are currently manufactured in the Dominican Republic.[2] The brand is currently owned by the Spanish company
Altadis, a subsidiary of
Imperial Brands.
History
Henry Clay was founded in the 1840s by a Spanish immigrant to Cuba, Julián Álvarez Granda.[3] The brand was nationalized by Fidel Castro's government following the
Cuban Revolution, and manufacturing was severely reduced throughout the 1960s.[4]
By 1986, Henry Clay's American trademark was owned by Consolidated Cigar Corpation, which started producing non-Cuban Henry Clays. The Consolidated Cigar Corporation was eventually purchased by
Altadis.[6]
Maurice Leblanc's gentleman thief
Arsène Lupin was noted to have used a Henry Clay cigar to conceal a reply to an invented associate as a part of his escape from jail in Arsène Lupin in Prison.
In the film
Blackmail (1929 film) the blackmailer is offered a Henry Clay cigar but instead chooses a Corona.
The
Kurt Weill song 'Matrosen-Tango' (Sailor-Tango) includes the lyric 'Und Zigarren rauchen wir Henry Clay ... Denn andere Zigarren, die rauchen wir nicht' (And we smoke Henry Clay cigars... we don't smoke any other cigars).
In
Thomas Mann's 1924 novel
The Magic Mountain, the character Hofrat Behrens remarks that he almost died smoking "two small Henry Clay's".