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]
In popular culture
In the Russian and Soviet poet, playwright and actor Vladimir Vladimirovich Mayakovsky's 1925 poem Шаблон:Ill 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.
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".
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