Bob Saitta’s grandfather, Guy, ran a simple shop with simple rules when he opened El Sol Cigars in 1929. One of those rules concerned advertising. He didn't have much use for it. And that's what the frugal shopkeeper told Saitta’s father, Tony, who joined the family business in 1980 after a career in, well, advertising. “My grandfather said we don't advertise. We just put [the money] into the product and the word gets around,” Saitta says.

It hasn’t hurt. As a third-generation tobacco dealer, Saitta is running Tampa’s oldest cigar store, at 1728 Seventh Avenue, in the middle of the Ybor strip. His no-nonsense philosophy mirrors his grandfather's. “The focus of the business - customer service up there at the top - is still very similar to what my grandfather did,” he says. Instead of paper packages tied up with strings, Saitta now ships cigar orders in custom-made packages, via UPS. He takes orders over the telephone, by fax and on the internet, where he has a store Web site. That is new. Not much else is.

“I've got stuff in here that's a hundred years old,” he says, including cigar boxes, labels and the cypress wood chair where his grandfather sat to roll cigars. “People want to buy it. I wouldn't sell it for my life,” he says. He used to employ a cigar maker who cut and rolled cigars in his shop. It was mostly for show and didn’t last. “People loved it,” says. “But it’s a messy operation. The tobacco dust is really fine and permeates the air. It gets into everything.” No nonsense.

Guy Saitta came to Tampa from Louisiana and began rolling the first Smok-A-Cuba cigars. He and his Tampa-born wife, Mary, ran into problems when Hav-A-Tampa claimed the similar name was an infringement, so they changed the brand to El Sol. Only in recent years has Bob Saitta reintroduced the Smok-A-Cuba name. Saitta, 43, took over the business from his father after going to New York to study literature in college, then to Japan for eight years to study and to teach English. When he returned in 1992, Ybor City and the cigar business were in decline - but not for long. “Within a year or so, the area started booming and the cigar industry took off,” he says. Saitta chose to maintain a solid, cost-conscious operation. “A lot of the smoker events, the lounges - they were [invented by] people who came into the industry late and decided to do things upscale. A lot of those place are no longer around,” he says.

Still, Saitta doesn't exactly chase people away from his store. “Some of our older customers, from 10 years or so, they'll stay and chat for a few minutes. But they're not going to stay for hours,” he says. “It's not that type of world anymore. In my grandfather’s time, they would sit down even longer, talking with the cigar makers.” Saitta describes his customers as, “in general, a great group of people... understanding, laid-back, and honest as the day is long.”

Saitta came into the business reluctantly and at times has considered running back to New York. But he can’t do it. “You develop a love for the people you work with, the industry,” he says. “I’m almost like a bartender. There are times customers call up and start telling me about their kids, their wives - it feels like I’m part of it. These people have become like real friends.''

Across the street and a few blocks west is Barco’s King Corona Cigar Factory, probably the closest thing Ybor has to a hip cigar lounge. But don't tell that to Barco, an Ybor City kid who is also hip - as in hip-deep in tobacco tradition.

At the King Corona, you can get a cigar in the same shop where you get your haircut, buy a Cuban guayabera shirt, and listen to jazz bands. “It all just fits in,” says Barco, who brought in high school pal Richard Avila to open a barbershop in the middle of his store. “And,” he adds, “there were no barbers in Ybor City.” But the emphasis is on selling good cigars at a good price. He still bristles at the mention of the cigar boom and the inflated prices that hurt the old-timers, the regulars who smoke two or three cigars a day and always had. “There’re still high prices out there, but the demand for lower-priced cigars has increased,” he says. And the quality, he says, has become more consistent as the demand for raw tobacco has leveled off.

Barco looks out his store window and marvels at how Ybor has risen from its own ashes, and how he got a stake in it just in time. “I’ve always had a gut feeling that Ybor City was going to do well,” he says. He opened in 1998 with 5,000 square feet on the ground floor of an old brick building that in a previous life was Raul Vega’s dress shop. “A woman came in here one day; she was in her 90s, and said she bought her wedding dress here,” he says. There are no dresses now. There are, however, cigars - 60 to 80 brands on the shelf and in the walk-in humidor. The coffee bar, the barbershop, and the jazz shows came later, just because it seemed to make sense, and he had the room. “I’ve got people walking in all the time and telling me, ‘This is the nicest cigar environment I've ever been in,’” Barco says. “These kind of things all mesh with cigars. It's a Latin thing.”

The jazz club attracts a tame crowd by Ybor City standards: adults who are more apt to be home in bed at 2 a.m. than tangling with local police. The club also attracts more women smokers these days. Barco likes them, and says they’re more serious about cigars than many men, wanting to know all about the brands they choose. “They ask the right questions,” he says.

Barco, 50, has been in the tobacco industry for 18 years, joining his father-in-law’s tobacco business after hurting his back in a construction job. It was an inevitable leap. When he married Brenda Garcia Barco, he joined a family that came from Cuba three generations ago to roll cigars, then operated their own chinchale, making Tampa Rico brand cigars. It has given him respect for the people and the business - something he finds lacking among newcomers. He recalls one Northerner who, after looking around the shop, complained that Barco’s inventory wasn't close to what he’d seen from catalog companies.