The Making Of Montecristo

[JohnS]

The history of the Montecristo marca since its launch in 1935 is a long one. Below is a concise article which details that journey...

The Making Of Montecristo

Now in its 90th year, this legendary cigar has become a benchmark Cuban brand

By Gregory Mottola - From José Andrés, November/December 2025 

The Cuban Montecristo design has hardly changed since the brand was created. The box on the upper left is from 1959. The other yellow boxes are current. Non-Cuban Montecristos (on the upper right) are for the U.S. market.

Before Cohiba, there was Montecristo. Before the name Fidel Castro was known around the world, before the creation of Habanos S.A. and before Cohiba was thrust into the spotlight as a global signifier of luxury goods, Montecristo was the brand regarded as the Rolls-Royce of cigars. The iconic line, with its bright yellow box and interlocking rapiers, turned 90 this year, and since its launch in 1935 it has become a force of nature in the cigar world, beloved by five generations of smokers on the sheer power of its reputation.

Montecristo has been Cuba’s best-selling brand by volume for decades. The world’s appetite for Montecristo continues to be insatiable, and Cuba, handicapped by tobacco shortages and infrastructure issues, struggles to keep up with demand. Even under normal circumstances, it takes more than three years to produce a single Montecristo cigar.

In the United States, where Cuban cigars are illegal, Montecristo transcends its Cuban roots and takes on a different identity in both Dominican and Nicaraguan form, thanks to the efforts of Altadis U.S.A., owners of the trademark for the U.S. market. In some respects, the brand has completely evolved. In other respects, it has stayed the same—the first five sizes that came to market in the 1930s remain in production and are as relevant today as they were during the Roosevelt administration.

In 1955, Montecristo creator Alonso Menéndez stands on a bale of tobacco to dedicate a new factory in Cuba as his son, Benjamin (at his immediate left), looks on.

The Beginning

Montecristo rose to stardom in a relatively short period of time, going from an unknown smoke in a curious yellow box to one of Cuba’s most sought-after brands in a mere 15 years. The story started when a wealthy Spaniard by the name of Alonso Menéndez came to Cuba with knowledge of tobacco and the desire to create a luxury cigar brand that stood out in the market. He purchased a factory called Particulares in 1935, which produced its namesake cigar as well as another brand called Byron, and named the cigar for the epic story The Count of Monte Cristo. A blend was established—something that had to be of higher quality than Particulares or Byron—and it came in five sizes: lonsdale,  corona, pirámide, petit corona and an even more petite half corona. We know them numerically as No. 1 to No. 5. Remarkably, those original sizes are still in production and the Montecristo No. 2 is now, and has been for a long time, the quintessential Cuban cigar.

In 1936, Menéndez took on a partner, former Partagás commercial manager José Manuel “Pepe” García, and formed Menéndez, García y Cía. The enterprising duo quietly drafted a blueprint for success. Menéndez focused on the processing of tobacco and construction of the cigars while García focused on sales and promotion. Both had expertise in their respective fields. They were competing against such high-profile brands as Partagás and Romeo y Julieta. The United Kingdom played a part in Montecristo’s rise to prominence.

“I think it is fair to say that the relationship between the Montecristo brand and the U.K. cigar smoker has been a long and happy friendship,” says Jemma Freeman, managing director of Hunters & Frankau, the United Kingdom’s importer of Cuban cigars.

That relationship dates back to 1936, when the British market was a vital one for Cuban cigars. That didn’t mean it was easy to infiltrate. Rejection is a common component to success stories, and originally, nobody wanted Montecristo. Many companies imported Cuban cigars into the United Kingdom then, and one after another rejected Montecristo. But John Hunter Morris & Elkan Co. Ltd. had a compelling reason to listen. Its competitor, J. Frankau & Co., was the exclusive distributor of H. Upmann, which had a loyal following in the United Kingdom. Hunter wanted an exclusive cigar of its own, something to compete against Upmann. The deal was done and an agreement was made to appoint Hunter the sole distributor of Montecristo for the next 15 years.

Though the H. Upmann factory has since moved, this is where Montecristo was made when it was owned by Menéndez, García y Cía. The address is Amistad 407-409, Havana.

To have a chance, it would have to stand out, otherwise Montecristo would just be another cigar in a wooden box. According to Hunters’ records, the design was developed and jazzed up by Jack Benham, managing director of the company responsible for the brand’s crossed sword motif and the bold choice of colors that helped it stand out from the many other boxes on the market.

The cigar took off, and not just because of the packaging. From the beginning, Menéndez envisioned Montecristo as a super-premium cigar before the term even existed. He did this by meticulously sourcing his tobacco, particularly wrapper from Cuba’s El Corojo farm, believed to be one of the finest plots of tobacco land on the planet. El Corojo was started by Diego Rodriguez in the 1920s, who later developed the famed Corojo seed varietal, now retired by the Cuban cigar industry in place of more disease-resistant strains. Menéndez, García y Cía. was one of the largest, if not the largest buyers of this storied wrapper. The fact that Menéndez did not own any farms meant that his company differed from some of the top Cuban brands of the time.

Another major pillar propping up Montecristo was venerated tobacconist Alfred Dunhill Ltd. Dunhill shops in London and New York were direct pipelines to discerning consumers willing to pay more money for a better cigar, and Dunhill promoted Montecristo heavily, especially in Manhattan where Alfred Dunhill was the exclusive seller of the brand.

“The original plan for Montecristo was to sell it only in a limited number of the most reputable cigar merchants starting with Alfred Dunhill’s stores in London and New York,” says Freeman.

Montecristo became so successful so fast that in 1937, Menéndez, García was able to purchase the H. Upmann factory from J. Frankau for a purported £100,000 (worth about $7.4 million today), and production of Montecristo was subsequently transferred there. Not only did the new owners leave the factory name alone, they directed some of the resources from Montecristo toward H. Upmann, which was struggling at the time. To this day, there is no Montecristo cigar factory, in Cuba or elsewhere.

Things were going splendidly for the brand until World War II broke out in 1939. Hitler began bombing London, killing tens of thousands and damaging much of the city, including the Dunhill shop on Duke Street, which was destroyed in 1941. Furthermore, the United Kingdom halted the importation of Cuban cigars for 13 years (they were viewed as a nonessential staple during wartime). The situation seemed bleak, but there was an upside: no such restrictions existed in the United States. Seeing how Cuba was officially aligned with the Allied Forces, commerce could continue between Havana and New York. Much of what would have been the United Kingdom’s supply of Montecristos went to the United States, turning the country into one of the brand’s largest markets.

Even war couldn’t stop Dunhill from doing business. Alfred H. Dunhill sells pipes amid the rubble of his shop after London was bombed in 1941.

Benjamin Menéndez, the son of the founder Alonso, is one of the last living links to the original Montecristo operation. He worked for his father at the Upmann factory in Havana prior to the Revolution. Now 89, Menéndez is retired from the tobacco business. His advanced age prevents him from leaving his house much. Should someone want a first-hand account of Montecristo before the Revolution, one must pay him a visit the way one seeks an oracle or a sage atop a mountain. He smokes one cigar per day on his porch in South Florida, seated under a picture of Jesus Christ, his sacred heart aglow.

Because he was forced to flee Cuba so quickly, Menéndez has no photos left of the factory. No documents to show, no physical proof to offer. What he does have is a treasure trove of stories about the brand, including that it was most likely named after the classic novel. “My father read the book and he liked it,” he says. He reveals something few know about the origin of Montecristo: Menéndez wasn’t the first to have it, and there was an earlier version of the brand that is even older, dating back to 1868. Menéndez, García bought the trademark from Joseph Cullman Jr., father of Edgar Cullman Sr., who later acquired General Cigar. On a tobacco-buying visit to Cuba, Cullman Jr. stopped by Menéndez’s factory and saw the packaging for Montecristo.

“He said to my father ‘Montecristo? We own that brand in the United States,’” Menéndez recounts. “Well, my father wasn’t interested in the U.S. market. Cuba was the best market and he was not intending to export Montecristo.”

At the time, the U.S.-made Montecristo was little known and not much of a money maker, so Cullman made Menéndez an offer. “He told my father, ‘I’ll sell it to you for one dollar, and the price of the existing labels. That, you have to buy.’ ” Neither one had any idea what a powerhouse that name would become.

Menéndez’s memory remains sharp, and he’s happy to reveal other untold stories. After Montecristo was transferred to the H. Upmann factory, the two brands were made simultaneously in the same facility. That’s common knowledge. But when asked the difference between H. Upmann and Montecristo in his father’s factory, he lets out a loud laugh. “The blend was exactly the same. The only difference was that Montecristo had a special selection wrapper that was lighter. Remember, the wrapper was Corojo. And selection was done on a table with 72 to 74 shades of color. The light brown ones in the middle, those were selected for Montecristo. When you bought a box of Montecristo, you were going to have a very specific color.”

The post-war cigar market in the United States was dominated by Clear Havanas, cigars made in the United States out of Cuban leaf. They could be found at drug stores, newsstands and smoke shops, and they sold for around a quarter apiece, sometimes even less. Better stores stocked Cuban-made cigars, which were more expensive. If you went back in time to 1957 and walked into the Dunhill shop on New York’s Fifth Avenue, you could buy a corona-sized Montecristo No. 3 for 60 cents, and $15 would get you an entire box of 25. Three years later, it would have set you back $17.75, or 70 cents a smoke. That may seem laughably inexpensive today, but back then, that was a lot of money for cigars—and people were paying it.

“In the ’50s, the biggest market was Spain, the second was Cuba and the third was the United States,” says Menéndez. “In the United States, Montecristo was sold only in the Dunhill stores. They were the importers and the retailers.” Montecristo closed out the decade as one of Cuba’s hottest cigars, making the crossed rapiers and fleur de lis a bright, yellow symbol of Cuban capitalism and its capabilities.

In the United States, you could only get Montecristos at an Alfred Dunhill shop. Here’s a 1957 magazine ad for both.

The Castro Era

On September 15, 1960 armed troops invaded the H. Upmann factory, sealed the company’s safety deposit box and forbade anyone from entering. Benji Menéndez was there.

“The day of the confiscation I was in charge of making the schedule of production,” he says. He was 24 years old. “When I came to the factory at 7 o’clock, I found myself with a militia guy,” Menéndez recounted in a previous interview. “He said, ‘we are taking the company.’ ”

It was a day of infamy across Cuba’s cigar industry, and other factories were being taken at the same time, along with tobacco plantations and other assets. Fidel Castro’s forces had nationalized Cuba’s entire cigar industry, making it part of the state.

His story is not at all uncommon. Like everyone in Cuba who owned a cigar brand at the time, Menéndez and his family lost everything. The Menéndez family left Cuba. Montecristo became property of the state and less than two years later, President John F. Kennedy would declare a complete trade embargo on Cuba. Montecristo was kicked out of the United States.

Menéndez and García regrouped in the Canary Islands. They started Compania Insular Tabacalera S.A. (CIT) in 1961 and released a brand called Montecruz,  which looked a lot like Montecristo, from the yellow box and similar name to the identical fonts and even the crossed swords—and that was the point. Menéndez and Garcia were copying themselves in a not-so-subtle way. Success came soon as U.S. cigar smokers found Montecruz an acceptable replacement, even if it wasn’t made in Havana and had no Cuban tobacco. Dunhill became the exclusive importer of Montecruz (as they did with Montecristo in the pre-Castro era) but this time, Dunhill took a less monopolistic approach and sold it to other retailers. Menéndez says it “became the No. 1 brand in the United States for premium cigars.”

However, the name Montecruz wasn’t enough. In March 1972, Menéndez and García sued Faber, Coe and Gregg, the preeminent distributor of Cuban cigars for the United States before the embargo. Alonso Menéndez was seeking the rights to sell Montecristo in the United States on the grounds that he was the rightful owner of the trademark. Menéndez won. His victory in the case of Menéndez vs. Faber, Coe and Gregg Inc. granted him rights to sell Montecristo in the United States, albeit without Cuban tobacco. More than that, the landmark case set a legal precedent for other Cuban expatriates who lost their brands to the Castro regime. 

That same year, Consolidated Cigar Corp. (then owned by conglomerate Gulf + Western) took notice. The tobacco giant bought a controlling interest in CIT. To further solidify protection of the trademarks, Consolidated and García created a Netherlands Antilles company called Cuban Cigar Brands N.V. By the 1970s, the trademark was secured, and the first non-Cuban Montecristos were sold in the United States.

Benjamin Menéndez talking about Montecristo at a Big Smoke in 2022.

Consolidated moved operations from the Canary Islands to La Romana, Dominican Republic, where it not only owned a factory, but where labor was cheaper. Consolidated eventually became Altadis U.S.A. and non-Cuban Montecristos have been in the corporation’s control ever since.

Menéndez recalls trying to come up with a blend for the non-Cuban Montecristo. “I was told to make a blend that comes as close to Cuba without using Cuban tobacco. We did a test with Montecristo and H. Upmann and the wrapper we used for Montecristo was Indonesian Sumatra, but it was a failure. When I showed it to my father, he said ‘This is pure shit.’ ” Menéndez laughs a bit and shrugs. “I said ‘Well, you can still change it.’ ”

Oddly, by the time Consolidated had established a blend for a non-Cuban Montecristo, Menéndez had left to work for another company. He was never part of the market release.  

The Many Facets Of Montecristo

Since the 1970s, two versions of Montecristo have existed: Cuban and non-Cuban. In reality, there are many more than that. In the United States, consumers have seen many different versions, all in varying strengths and styles. On top of the core line, there’s a milder White Series and a stronger Platinum Series followed by another offshoot called Monte by Montecristo, all of which are made in the Dominican Republic. In 2014, Altadis decided to create a Montecristo made in Nicaragua. The cigar, which was made by Nestor Plasencia, was called Montecristo Espada and consisted entirely of Nicaraguan tobacco.

Turning to Nicaragua proved to be a foreshadow for the expansion of the brand. Three years later, Altadis would give cigarmaker A.J. Fernandez a chance to make a Montecristo with his name on it. His first attempt, the awkwardly named Montecristo Crafted by AJ Fernandez, was forgettable, but the company truly struck gold in 2020 when it released the Montecristo 1935 Anniversary Nicaragua, also made by Fernandez. It was the strongest Montecristo to date and garnered the most critical acclaim this magazine has ever given to a non-Cuban Montecristo. The No. 2 was named No. 2 cigar of 2021 in our Top 25, and the Montecristo 1935 Espeso was named No. 2 cigar of 2024, with a rating of 97 points. Altadis and Fernandez also expanded Montecristo with the Montecristo Nicaragua Diamante and Doble Diamante, a cigar that retails for $150.

In creating such a laudable series of cigars, Altadis gave a face to the brand, and that face belongs to Rafael Nodal, vice president of product capability for Tabacalaera USA, Altadis U.S.A.’s parent company. Collaborating with A.J. Fernandez was Nodal’s idea and once he established the blend with Fernandez, he immediately hit the road, traveling from state to state promoting the brand at in-store events, cigar dinners and smoking engagements. It’s a job Nodal does not take lightly.

“A large amount of pressure does not begin to describe the responsibility of working with such an iconic brand,” he admits. “I am honored and humbled to be able to create blends for these heritage brands, but I pray every day that I can look back and feel proud that I was able to positively influence, however little, the journey of Montecristo in the U.S.A.”  

Despite the huge marketing push by Habanos S.A. to promote Cohiba, there are enough Montecristo loyalists around the world keeping the brand in overdrive. And with the egregiously high cost of Cohiba since the infamous price hike of 2022, Montecristo is an even more attractive option. Almost every market representative around the globe names Montecristo as its best-selling brand by volume and this has been the case for decades. For many years, the Montecristo No. 4 was Cuba’s best-selling size by volume. While the best-selling size today is the Partagás Serie D No. 4, Montecristo remains No. 1 in many markets.

“Montecristo is the best-selling premium Cuban cigar brand [in Spain] both in volume and value,” says José Fernández Cabezas, the marketing director for Cuban cigar distributor Tabacalera S.L.U. “It is the most emblematic brand in the Spanish market. For all Spanish aficionados, Montecristo is without any doubt a reference and a very appreciated cigar.”

Monte is also the king of British cigars. “Montecristo is the most popular Havana brand in our portfolio by volume,” says Freeman, “and the Montecristo No. 4 is the best-selling Havana cigar in the United Kingdom as has been the case for many years.”

The No. 4 was the best-selling size even back when Menéndez’s family ran the operation. The No. 2 was also popular as well, and they could never meet demand. “We were always back ordered because the No. 2 was a cigar that nobody wanted to make,” he explains, adding that the pointy torpedo shape proved tricky to roll properly. Too much tobacco in the tapered head would cause a plugged cigar, and that got rejected. “We had 458 rollers. Of that, maybe 15 would roll the No. 2. We paid them more. All the cigars were inspected by the head of the cigar department and by my father. If a cigar was rejected, you were not paid for it. So, if you made a bad No. 2, you didn’t get paid.”

Cuba has expanded Montecristo with major additions: the Edmundo (in 2004), the first of a series of sizes bearing the Edmundo name; Montecristo Open (2009); and the Línea 1935, a super-premium extension introduced in 2017.

Now that countries like the Dominican Republic and Nicaragua have become far more sophisticated in terms of growing tobacco and producing cigars, comparisons between Cuban and non-Cuban Montecristos seem less important. Today, it’s more a question of taste than it is of quality.

“The brand always has to change and evolve,” says Nodal. “We want to innovate, but in ways that respect the history and tradition of one of the most iconic cigar brands in the world.”

As for Benji Menéndez, he still thinks of those days in Cuba, and the brand his family once owned.

“I know I’m not going back to Cuba,” he says. “I know I will be buried in the United States, but my love will always be there with Upmann and Montecristo. I will always have that emotional connection.” 

Source: https://www.cigaraficionado.com/article/the-making-of-montecristo