MONTECRISTO

A novel on the factory floor

A cigar factory could be a surprisingly literary place. While the rollers worked, a lector read aloud. Habanos traces the Montecristo name to Alexandre Dumas’ The Count of Monte Cristo, a favorite among the cigar makers. An adventure full of betrayal, fortune and reinvention had found an appreciative audience among people whose working day required patience and skilled hands.

The name brought a little of that romance into the humidor. It also gave the brand an identity that could travel: memorable, unmistakably literary and quite at home beside the crossed swords that became its emblem.

Menéndez makes his move

Montecristo began in Havana in 1935 at the Particulares factory, under Spanish entrepreneur Alonso Menéndez. The following year, he formed Menéndez, García y Cía with José Manuel “Pepe” García, a former Partagás commercial manager. As Gregory Mottola’s history recounts, Menéndez concentrated on tobacco and manufacture; García handled sales.

The original range comprised five cigars, numbered 1 through 5. In 1937, the partners bought H. Upmann and moved Montecristo production there. A brand barely two years old had helped bring its owners one of Havana’s established cigar factories.

One dollar, plus the labels

In a 2025 interview, Alonso’s son, Benjamin “Benji” Menéndez, recalled Joseph Cullman Jr. visiting the factory and recognizing the Montecristo name. Cullman already owned the American trademark. His offer, according to Benji, was to sell those U.S. rights for one dollar plus the cost of the existing labels. A small transaction secured a name that would become enormously valuable.

Seven dollars and a second life

Benji’s education began on the factory floor. His father required him to learn each department and paid him half the wage of its lowest-paid employee, he told David Savona in 2002.

After the Cuban government took over the business in 1960, that training became something he could carry with him. Benji remembered leaving Cuba on November 26, 1960, with his wife, three children and seven dollars.

He sold cigarettes in Miami, trained at a Brooklyn foundry and, in 1961, opened a cigar operation in Las Palmas in the Canary Islands, backed by his father. Its Montecruz cigars carried crossed swords that recalled the family’s lost business. Cuban Montecristo continued on the island; the Menéndez family was writing a new chapter abroad.

An evening at the racecourse

Montecristo eventually found a setting that feels especially appropriate for PLAYHORSE. In 2017, nearly 500 guests previewed the Cuban Línea 1935 at Madrid’s Zarzuela Hippodrome. Javier Botella and Copa Ilustrada supplied jazz and swing, while the evening’s offerings included caviar and Spanish ham. The brand’s founding year had become the name of a new line, introduced amid the pleasures of a long night out.

Montecristo goes to Hollywood

Jack Nicholson made his preference plain in a 1995 interview with Arthur Marx. After lunch, the actor settled into an armchair, brought out a Montecristo and counted the brand among his favorites. It is an easy scene to picture: Nicholson at home, surrounded by books and art, enjoying the conversation on his own terms.

Demi Moore supplied a different picture the following year. Interviewed on the Florida set of G.I. Jane, she was smoking a Cuban Montecristo Joyita. She preferred slender panatelas, though she said she also liked the No. 2. Moore described a set where cigars were common and recalled director Ridley Scott regularly having a Montecristo No. 2 in his hand.

James Woods was equally enthusiastic about that pointed format. In a 1997 profile, he praised Montecristo No. 2s as “the perfect cigar.” These interviews capture a particular Hollywood era, when a discussion of acting could wander quite naturally into a discussion of what was in the humidor.

The tobacco behind the swords

Cuban Montecristo draws its tobacco from Vuelta Abajo, in Pinar del Río. Habanos describes the brand’s long-filler cigars as entirely handmade with leaf from that western Cuban growing region. For Línea 1935, it specifically identifies the wrapper, binder and filler as coming from Vuelta Abajo.

There is room for different personalities within the name. Habanos classifies the Clásica and Edmundo families as medium to full in strength, Open as medium, and Línea 1935 as full. That makes the particular line a useful part of any conversation about Montecristo’s character.

The shapes carry their own identities, too. The No. 2 is recognizable by its tapered head; the compact No. 4 has a straight-sided form. Both belong to the original numbered family, familiar reference points in a range that has grown far beyond its first five cigars.

A wider tobacco map

Outside Cuba, Montecristo has a separate portfolio with different blends. The White Series is made in the Dominican Republic, using an Ecuadorian Connecticut Shade wrapper, a Nicaraguan binder, and Dominican and Nicaraguan filler. The wrapper’s growing origin is Ecuador; Connecticut Shade describes its type.

The White Series has its own admirers. Actor Jack Topalian, whose credits include The Blacklist, named the White Series Churchill as his favorite in a 2026 profile. It is a useful reminder that affection for Montecristo extends across distinct Cuban and non-Cuban expressions.

The Montecristo 1935 Anniversary Nicaragua marked the brand’s eighty-fifth anniversary in 2020. Developed with Rafael Nodal, AJ Fernandez and the Grupo de Maestros, it is made in Nicaragua with Nicaraguan wrapper, binder and filler. This anniversary cigar and Cuba’s Línea 1935 have different blends and production histories.

Fernandez produced the anniversary line at his San Lotano factory in Ocotál. Nodal described its gentle pressing as a tribute to an older production tradition. The result has a softly squared shape, another way for a modern cigar to acknowledge the past without being frozen in it.