Tampa’s Cigar Haunts

by By Steven Girardi

Don Barco is sitting in an overstuffed chair in the storefront window of the King Corona Cigar Factory, looking out at Seventh Avenue, the main strip in Tampa’s historic Ybor City. People walk past, but barely notice him. There are far more unusual sights on this gritty, Latin-flavored strip, where the traditional and the bizarre live side-by-side. Barco is among the traditional, and he’s talking about cigars and the trendy smoking parlors that a few years ago popped up like discos in the 1970’s. His expression turns sour. “Prices got ridiculous. It became a snobbish thing,” he says, sliding forward to the edge of his chair. People actually bragged about paying $15 for a cigar, he says. “You ask anybody from Tampa about paying $15 for a cigar and they’ll tell you you're crazy.”

Barco has no problem with good cigars. In a city made famous by cigars, Barco, like the other dealers here, appreciates nothing more than a quality smoke, and he has a store full of them for sale. But cigars in Ybor City are not about the latest fad. Cigar smoking here is a matter-of-fact pursuit, both too mundane and too sacrosanct to be a fashion statement. “It’s a serious cigar smoking town,” says Bob Saitta, owner of the El Sol Cigar shop his grandfather opened in 1929.

These are tobacco purists, cigar dealers with roots 100 years deep, descendants of the Spanish, Cuban, and Sicilian immigrants who put Tampa on the map and cigars in the hands of an entire country. They rolled cigars in factories: Arturo Fuente, Cuesta-Rey, Punch, Hoyo de Monterrey, Hav-A-Tampa. They rolled them in chinchales - small family-run cigar shops - and some still do. They rolled them in their kitchens. By the 1920s, Tampa was the world headquarters for the cigar industry, with about 10,000 rollers working in 200 factories. They lived in shotgun-style casitas in the neighborhood created by Vicente Martinez Ybor, a Spanish cigar maker who came from Key West in a race with rival Ignazio Haya to build new factories and escape labor unrest. Others followed, and factories spread. But it was Ybor's city, built on the 40 acres he bought in the 1880s, that was -and is - the center of tobacco, nightlife, and Latin culture in Tampa.

Through the wrought-iron arch that spans the entryway to La Setima - Seventh Avenue - and from Avenido Republica de Cuba to the historic Columbia Restaurant a half-mile away at 22nd Street, it’s a hodgepodge: dance-hall clothing boutiques, a female impersonators club, a tattoo store, a fine Italian restaurant, the new $45-million, Centro Ybor retro-styled retail and restaurant complex, and shot-and-beer taverns. Worn-out brick buildings cling to old wrought-iron porch rails and latticework. The street corner air is thick with the aroma of coffee and tobacco, the side streets dotted with historic inns and clubs. Buy a cigar here and it comes with history, and likely from a grandson of the original makers.

From his shop at the east end of the Seventh Avenue strip, Sonny Capitano is selling the same Don Capitano cigars his grandfather, Guiseppi, was making by hand in 1900. But with $250,000 in inventory, he's selling a lot of others, too.

Capitano returned to the cigar business 10 years ago to open Metropolitan Cigars - not that he was ever far removed from it. Metropolitan Pharmacy, the family business since 1897, was always one of the city’s top cigar retailers. But now it's strictly cigars for Capitano, who, at 65, is happy to spend his days greeting old friends and new customers. Metropolitan claims to have one of the world’s largest walk-in humidors; that's because the entire store, all 2,700 square feet of it, is a humidor. The walls are cedar-paneled, and the air is kept moist by breadbox-sized humidifiers that spit clouds of wet air from the four corners of the room.

Capitano grew up in Ybor, roaming the streets with Carlos Fuente, whose grandfather Arturo’s cigars made Tampa famous, and a whole generation of cigar makers' kids. Like most of the cigar makers, Guiseppi Capitano, a Sicilian, came here through Key West, and landed in Tampa just before 1900. Sonny’s uncle, Francisco, started a cigar factory with the family brand and a self-designed seal that still says, ‘Tampa, Florida.’ “He couldn’t read English,” Sonny says with a shrug.

The Francisco Capitano & Co. factory closed in 1946. “He just retired, and nobody in the family wanted to carry it on,” Sonny says of his uncle, a familiar story around Ybor. “The kids all went on to college and such things.” A few Don Capitanos are still hand-rolled at Metropolitan, but most are made in Honduras and the Dominican Republic. They are favorites of Bill Cosby, who Sonny met five years ago when the comedian flew into Tampa for a show and began looking for cigars. The limousine chauffeur delivered him to Metropolitan. “He said, ‘I'm looking for Sonny.’ I said, ‘Well, that’s me.’” An hour or so later, Cosby left with about with $2,500 in cigars. “That's a man that knows cigars,” Sonny says. Now he sends cigars to Cosby all over the country, and occasionally flies out to hand-deliver them as Cosby’s guest.

But don’t be misled. Metropolitan remains very much a neighborhood store, with cigars selling from $1.40 to $18 apiece, most in the $5 range. Regulars and tourists keep the inventory moving, and from time to time another neighborhood kid, Ferdie Pacheco, the famed “Fight Doctor” for Muhammad Ali, drops in. That’s never a short visit. Around Ybor, Pacheco is legendary as a talker. “Oh, my God,” Capitano says, putting a hand to his forehead. “He'll go on for two hours.” They grew up together, both the sons of pharmacy owners, until Pacheco moved to Miami. Capitano says the cigar boom in the mid-1990’s put a sharp demand on tobacco and a strain on old-timers unaccustomed to double-digit cigar prices, which they found as offensive as they did ludicrous. “But you knew it would level out; that the junk would fall out,” Capitano says. “The old distributors like me, we held the right prices.”

Capitano can point to any number of brands on his shelves when asked for a recommendation - Opus X, Don Sixto, Montecristo, Cuesta-Rey. But don't ask him to join you. He doesn't smoke them. “It's like the baker,” he says. “He bakes bread all day long, he goes home and he doesn't even want to look at a loaf of bread.”

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