Henry Clay (cigar)

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Henry Clay

Product type	Cigar
Owner	Imperial Brands
Produced by	Altadis USA
Country	United States
Introduced	1840s
Markets	United States
Carcinogenicity: IARC group 1

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.

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]

The cigar's American Trademark was owned by the Henry Clay and Bock & Co. Ltd. located in Trenton, New Jersey. Henry Clay and Bock & Co. Ltd. became a component of the Tobacco Trust that, along with other trusts, was an object of the antitrust legislation of the United States.^[5]

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]

• In the Russian and Soviet poet, playwright and actor Vladimir Vladimirovich Mayakovsky's 1925 poem Блек энд уайт/Black and White  [ru] portraying issues of racism and capitalist exploitation, the setting is a Henry Clay and Bock Ltd. cigar factory in Havana.
• 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.
• In George Simenon's novel, Pietr the Latvian [fr], the book's namesake is observed by Inspector Maigret smoking a Henry Clay cigar.
• 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".

• Henry Clay at Altadis USA

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