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TOBACCO BUSINESS
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General Cigar’s
Macanudo:
The Evolution of an Icon
T
The story of Macanudo begins with Edgar M. Cullman,
a brilliant entrepreneur with a great vision, who built
Macanudo to become one of the world’s most successful
and enduring handmade cigar brands. Raised by a fam-
ily of well-respected tobacco dealers, Cullman’s father,
Joseph M. Cullman, began growing tobacco in Con-
necticut in the early 1900s. It was Joseph M. Cullman
who pioneered tobacco growing in Connecticut. At one
point, the Cullman family cultivated more than 1,800
acres of fine wrapper tobacco there. This very tobacco
would later become the foundation of Macanudo.
Edgar Cullman was educated at Yale University and
served in the military in Washington, D.C., for the
Alien Property Custodians. After his service, learned to
roll cigars in New York City in 1944, coincidentally not
far from where Macanudo’s luxury cigar lounge, Club
Macanudo, is located today.
Fast forward to 1961. Edgar Cullman teamed up with
a group of investors to purchase General Cigar Compa-
ny for $25 million. The rest, as they say, is history.
In 1968, the Cullman’s General Cigar Company pur-
chased the Temple Hall factory in Kingston, Jamaica.
Temple Hall owned a small brand called Macanudo that
was produced for the British market. That would soon
change in a big way.
As Legends Would Have It
The world’s most respected tobacco men were in Edgar
Cullman’s employ, and he leveraged their expertise to the
hilt to establish Macanudo as the finest cigar available in
the U.S. market. Enter Alfons Mayer, an unsung legend
of the handmade cigar business and the first player in
Edgar’s dream team.
Like Edgar Cullman, Alfons Mayer was born into
a prominent tobacco family. While Edgar Cullman
received an Ivy League education, Mayer’s story took
a decidedly different turn. The German occupation of
Amsterdam forced him out of high school. He narrowly
escaped the Nazis in Holland and spent his time during
World War II teaching American soldiers to avoid im-
prisonment by the Germans.
After the end of World War II in 1945, Mayer was
sent by the Dutch prime minister (a friend of his family)
to Buenos Aires, Argentina, where his father had been
Macanudo
(mack-a-NEW-doe)
adj. [Spanish] -
Super or terrific;
the greatest
Jhonys Diaz
PREMIUM
CIGARS