By Mark Bernardo

The heat is sweltering here in Ybor City in early October, but Roberto Ramirez does not seem to notice, as he diligently devotes himself to his task at the rolling table at the Gonzalez y Martinez Cigar shop. He grew up with the heat, and he’s used to working in it - since age nine, in fact, when he first learned how to roll cigars from his family of torcedors and tobacco farmers in Cuba. Customers browse the extensive selection of premium cigars on the shelves, many taking a moment or two to observe Ramirez at work, some even snapping pictures. The attention is also something he’s used to; when you’ve plied your trade under the watchful eye of Fidel Castro, how much distraction can a few tourists from Topeka possibly be?

“You don’t have freedom there like you do here,” Ramirez responds when I ask his primary reason for leaving his career in Cuba - a prestigious quality control position, in charge of 500 factory workers - and for coming to Tampa. “If you are working in Cuba, you are working for Fidel. There is no other option. I wanted another option, so I came here.”

As Cuban cigar makers go, Ramirez is the exception to the rule: others of similar pedigree have seized the opportunities he has turned down - to manage factories in the Dominican Republic and Central America. But Ramirez wanted to pass on his knowledge of cigar making while experiencing all that American democracy had to offer. He first came to Miami, working at the La Gloria Cubana factory there, but his path ultimately led here, to the place that was, not so long ago, universally recognized as the cigar making capitol of the United States.

Times have changed in Ybor City. Cigar factories have given way to hotels, museums, and nightclubs, and men like Ramirez know that they are links to the neighborhood’s storied past rather than the foundations of its future. But the distinct culture of Ybor City remains, one uniquely linked to cigars. When asked if he would ever return to Cuba, even a Cuba without Castro, Ramirez answers without hesitation, summing up the feelings of the immigrants who built this legendary cigar city. “The system here is the best one in the world,” he states. “I am an American now… with an American dream.”

Ramirez is not the first dreamer to come here to Florida’s west coast in search of something better. The city of Tampa dates back to 1850, when it was founded after three unsuccessful attempts at a charter. A literal “cow town” with cattle roaming the dirt streets, Tampa consisted mainly of a few buildings clustered around former military forts, erected before the Civil War to fend off Indian attacks. The scenery consisted mainly of palmetto scrub, sand spurs, rattlesnakes, and, legend has it, barely enough water even for the alligators. The city’s fortunes began to change with the arrival of a transportation magnate from Connecticut named Henry Bradford Plant in 1881. Plant’s wife was stricken with tuberculosis, and as there was no cure at the time, he was taking her to the warmer climes of Florida to get relief. Finding no decent place to stay after their long journey by wagon, coach, horseback, and rail, Plant realized that he could do more to make this young city more accessible. By 1884 he had brought the railroad to Tampa, with steamship travel and a state-of-the-art port soon to follow. In 1891 he built the Tampa Bay Hotel, now the city’s University.

If it was transportation that jump-started the growth of Tampa, it was the cigar industry that fueled it. While Plant was building up the city, a small consortium of cigar manufacturers in Cuba was watching the developments with great interest. The point man for this group was one Vicente Martinez Ybor, a successful cigar manufacturer who was nevertheless dissatisfied with the state of affairs on the island, specifically the crushing tariffs imposed on his industry by Spain - at the time, still Cuba’s colonial overlords. Ybor had once before attempted to break from Spanish domination by setting up in Florida’s Key West, only to be undone by the 19th century’s rampant labor unrest. Tampa, however, gave him pause: here was a brand-new railway line and an easy steamship route to Cuba. He could move raw leaf from Cuba to Tampa, use the city to manufacture the cigars, and use the railroad to ship them directly from Tampa to the rest of the U.S., thus avoiding the Spanish tariffs on goods shipped from Cuba. Ybor was resolved that this developing city in Florida would be the site for his fresh start.

By 1886, the new settlement - called Mr. Ybor’s City, later shortened to Ybor City - was laid out in an organized grid, a contrast to the urban maze of greater Tampa. Tampa’s mosaic of immigrants - primarily Spanish and Cubans, but also Sicilian/Italians and Jews, flocked to it, sensing opportunity. By the end of the 19th century, the city had a sewer system, police and fire departments, and the old-fashioned gas street lamps that have become a symbol of its history, and it was all made possible by the cigar trade, which quickly became the economic lifeblood of Ybor City.

The social pecking order, despite the contributions of the immigrant community, remained fairly consistent: full-blooded Spaniards got the white-collar jobs running the factories, while the labor was mostly done by the Cubans, who were well-trained in the art of cigar making. Some Jews became owners - most notably the J.C. Newman family, who continue to a force in the cigar industry today with their Cuesta-Rey and Diamond Crown cigar brands, and are still based in Tampa. Even the Sicilians ran some factories, albeit only a few, and only after some amount of struggle. One of them was a chinchalle - a small, family-operated cigar workshop - run by a man named Capitano.

Today, his great-grandson Sam runs Metropolitan Cigars, a cigar shop housed in a former doctor’s office in Ybor City. We chat in a small office behind the counter, surrounded by framed images of the store’s most famous regular patron, comedian Bill Cosby. Like others whose families drifted from the cigar business, Capitano found himself drawn into it by the 1990s “boom” years. “Back in the late 1800s, this whole area was about cigars; it’s what my whole my family was doing,” he says. “My grandfather was the only one of his brothers and sisters who went to college. He became a pharmacist and when he passed away in the early 90s, he was the oldest practicing pharmacist in Florida.” The Capitanos were always close to the business, however. Sam’s grandmother continued to roll cigars while working in her husband’s pharmacy, and his father used to walk to school with Tampa’s most recognizable cigar icon, Carlos Fuente. “We’ve always known the Fuente family very well,” he states. “We even used to sell their cigars out of a little case in the pharmacy.” When the pharmacy closed in 1992, the next logical step for the Capitano family was to go into business selling cigars, renting an old shop from a retiring colleague, and finally in 1997, purchasing the current store. Family history also played a role in the decision to produce the current house brand, named Don Capitano. According to Sam, “My great grandfather had his own brand, and a friend of ours found an old cigar box of his, so we decided to make the cigars and keep the name.” There are two lines: one made in Honduras with Honduran filler, the other with Dominican filler, made locally by a husband-and-wife team of Cuban immigrants. Capitano takes some pride in the fact that he continues to make some cigars in the U.S.A. “A lot of tourists come here and want to take back something made here, and that means a lot,” he says. “My grandfather made cigars here in Ybor City, and we want to carry on that tradition - for as long as we can.”

Signs of the old traditions still abound in Ybor City’s modernized streets, if one knows where to look. A sharp-eyed observer can see which buildings were once cigar factories, as the design was fairly universal. All were three-story structures, with the sorting and stripping of leaves on the top floor, workers on the middle level, and shipping and receiving on the ground floor. The windows were huge, double-hung sash windows, big and numerous enough to let in sufficient light and air for the workers, who did not have the benefit of indoor lighting. Another telltale architectural tip-off is the watchtower cupola at the top. In Ybor’s heyday, the factory would send a comptroller into the tower to look out for the tobacco-carting ships sailing into the port from Cuba, and subsequently inform the factory, which would send a large wagon down to the docks to haul in the tobacco bales. And if their wagon arrived before the competition’s, to snap up more of the fine Havana leaf, so much the better. Most of the factories were built with wood, which is the reason so many of them are gone - consumed in fires caused by the widespread use of highly flammable kerosene in lamps, stoves, and heaters. Aside from the old Oliva factory, used today as a warehouse by the tobacco-growing Oliva family, none of the wooden buildings remain; what survives today are the brick buildings that replaced them. The V.M. Ybor Cigar Company factory, built by Ybor and his partner, Ignacio Haya, was the first to be built from the outset of brick rather than wood.

While Don Ybor (“Don” in Spanish is a title of respect) wanted to avoid another business-crippling fire, he also wanted to avoid being burned again by labor disputes. The cigar factory owners, led by Ybor himself, assured affordable housing for the cigar workers, most of whom had come to Tampa with little but the clothes on their backs. They built casitas, little houses that workers could pay for by deducting rent or mortgage payments from their wages - at the time, an unheard-of luxury. In the factories, they brought over the Cuban tradition of lectores - highly literate, well-educated individuals who read to the workers from the daily newspapers and classic novels. While the lectores helped make Ybor City’s immigrant cigar makers the most literate segment of North America’s working class, they also sowed the seeds of dissent that the owners had long hoped to suppress. The socialist treatises of Leon Trotsky and Karl Marx eventually joined the romantic fiction of Victor Hugo and Leo Tolstoy on the reading list, and the result was the early part of the 20th century being marked by strikes and clashes between management and labor. It was the opening salvo in a series of events that would push Ybor City into a steep decline from which it would not recover for decades.

The 1930s brought the Great Depression to America, and with it one of the earliest body blows to the domestic cigar trade inflicted, ironically, by the then-fledgling cigarette industry. Seeing handmade cigars as a threat to their mass-market, mechanized product that had gained popularity during the First World War, cigarette makers engaged in a campaign of scare propaganda, claiming publicly that cigars were sealed with human saliva. A patently untrue rumor, this assertion nevertheless had the desired effect on a populace still rife with tuberculosis, and smokers switched en masse to the cheaper, “cleaner” cigarettes. Cigar manufacturers countered by switching largely to mechanization themselves, and laying off scores of workers, who eventually fled to the suburbs, and away from their heritage… some of them never to return.

Walking down Ybor’s streets today, it is difficult to imagine that at its height there were over 300 cigar factories here, producing about 700 million cigars a year. There are no handmade factories left - though the art still survives on a miniscule scale at several of the cigar stores and modern-day chinchales, which account for much of the relatively small output of premium cigars made here today. The architecture, however, is still reminiscent of the bygone era when this area was the center of the U.S. cigar-making universe. Of the former Spanish Social Club (Centro Espanol) only the frame remains, now the heart of Centro Ybor, the entertainment complex that anchors today’s Ybor City, touted as the Nightlife Capitol of Florida’s west coast. It houses a movie theatre, comedy club, arcade, visitor center, and numerous shops and restaurants. My hotel, the Don Vicente de Ybor, named for the town’s legendary founder, is a boutique hotel that once served as a clinic built to provide health care to convalescing cigar workers. Spending a few nights here is probably the closest many of us will get to experiencing turn-of-the-century Havana, the period before war and revolution forever changed our country’s relationship with Cuba - with Ybor City as their American epicenter.

Politics and cigars have always been intertwined here, harking back to 1891, when the exiled Cuban patriot Jose Marti came to the city and gave a speech from the stairs of the V.M. Ybor factory, rallying the immigrant workers to contribute one day’s worth of their meager salaries toward the liberation of Cuba from Spanish rule. In 1895, Marti ordered insurrection with his handwritten “order of uprising,” a message tucked inside a cigar hand-rolled in a Tampa factory. Soon thereafter, the United States entered the Spanish-American War, ultimately freeing Cuba from Spain in 1898. Marti became known as Cuba’s liberator, and Ybor City as its Cradle of Independence.

The city’s ties to Cuba, however, would not save it from two devastating hits that were dealt to its declining economy and stagnant society in the 1960s. One was the Cuban embargo, initiated in 1962 by President Kennedy in response to Fidel Castro’s communist revolution. It was an abrupt end to imports of Cuban tobacco, still regarded as the finest in the world for cigars. The other was “urban renewal,” the catch phrase for the 1960s government initiative to reduce urban blight that resulted in the destruction of numerous irreplaceable historic buildings. The 1960s also brought tension in the multi-ethnic populace, particularly between the two primary Cuban communities - exiles, who were fiercely anti-Castro; and immigrants, some of whom were supporters of his regime, or Fidelistas.

Organized crime, headed by the infamous mob kingpin Santo Trafficante, had also become entrenched in Tampa well into the 1970s. Prostitution, gambling, corruption of local law enforcement, and the Bolita numbers racket, all were rampant. The discovery of a network of subterranean tunnels beneath Ybor City’s bustling 7th Avenue, used by the mob during Prohibition to transport booze, stands as testament to underworld influence on the city throughout much of the 20th century.

It was during this period that Don Barco came to Ybor City from rural Florida - an Irish-American who quickly took to the Latin-influenced culture like, in his words, “a duck to water.” Barco manages the King Corona Cigar Company, one of 7th Avenue’s most popular nightlife destinations that also happens to be one of the city’s most well-stocked cigar stores. It’s midday, and slightly less crowded, as he and I sit on the outdoor patio, smoking a rare treasure from King Corona’s large, eclectic humidor - a pair of Don Barco cigars with Cuban-seed Dominican filler aged since 1986, hand-rolled here in Ybor City (And yes, “Don” is his real first name, not a self-bestowed title). Barco reminisces about the Ybor City that was, where his wife’s grandfather ran a cigar factory down the street from here, and where his father-in-law had first approached him in the mid-1980s, in the midst of a career change, asking Barco to try his hand at the cigar business.

“After World War II, a lot of technology came into the business,” Barco explains, “and with the advent of that technology, many people stopped learning how to make cigars. But the final nail in the coffin of the industry here was the Cuban embargo. We stopped getting Cuban tobacco, and all the manufacturers and growers fled to the big three countries - Dominican Republic, Honduras, Nicaragua - to put their systems in place there. Then [the federal government] expanded the freeway system, and tore out a lot of the old homes and businesses. They called it urban renewal; I call it urban destruction. By the 1970s, there wasn’t much left here. It was dangerous to be on the streets in broad daylight.”

As is the case with many abandoned urban areas, it was an influx of artists and Bohemian types in the later 1970s and 1980s that started Ybor City back on the road to renaissance. The pride in its cigar-making heritage, however, still had a ways to go. Barco recalls the attitudes he encountered in his early days selling and making cigars at King Corona: “On the one hand, I loved the business,” he says. “On the other, I was almost ashamed to tell people I was in ‘the tobacco business.’ People were very negative about it back then.” The lack of seasoned cigar rollers and the expense of producing them domestically also caught up with Barco in the ‘80s, forcing him to outsource the manufacturing of his Don Barco and Light of Ybor house brands to Nicaragua and the Dominican Republic.

A strange thing happened about a decade later. Cigars were not only selling in record numbers; they were suddenly “cool.” As a consequence, around the cigar boom’s height in 1997, imported cigars shot up dramatically in price, and became increasingly scarce. Barco crunched the numbers and discovered that it actually made economic sense to bring production back to Ybor City. “The market was exploding so much, we couldn’t get enough finished cigars,” he recalls. “At the same time, there were young Cubans emigrating to the U.S., and while we used to see cigar prices go up by a dime or so, they were now going up by whole dollars. This allowed us to pay cigar rollers a decent wage and make hundreds of thousands of cigars, some of which are still aging.” The cigar boom was indeed the shot in the arm that Ybor City needed, inspiring more cigar shops and at one point, even a cigar festival with dances, parades, and a “Miss Tobacco Leaf” pageant. Ybor City was reconnecting with its roots - and a new generation of cigar enthusiasts was noticing, and visiting.

Most cigar production moved back outside the U.S. after the boom waned, however, and when I ask Barco about the future of cigar making in America, he replies with an air of resignation, comparing the industry’s plight with those of American steel and automobiles. “With the economics of today’s world, there are too many things against it,” he says. “Since the 1970s, we still have some companies making steel, but basically that industry has left this country. We’ve become a very service-oriented country, and we’ve lost that sense of creativity, that sense of making things, and that to me is tremendously sad. But I will go to my grave a very lucky man having caught the tail end of the heyday of Ybor City.”

A few years ago, Florida passed legislation banning smoking from most public places - which, to anyone who’s experienced Ybor City, is roughly equivalent to Wisconsin enacting a similar ban on the consumption of cheese and dairy products. Fortunately, the Don Vicente Inn offers a smoker-friendly balcony where one can sit back with a cigar and a drink, and bask in a glorious Florida sunset. As crowds start to gather below, prepared to venture out into the Cigar City night, it was difficult not to consider that a different kind of “heyday” may be happening right here and right now. As I smoked my Gonzalez y Martinez Churchill, rolled the previous day by the old man from Cuba, Roberto Ramirez, I recalled the questions I had about Ybor City when I arrived - specifically, one big question.

Was it, as one writer called it, “the Napa Valley of cigars” - the New World cradle of an Old World art? Or was it, as a different pundit observed, “the Allentown of cigars” - a community still dealing with the slow diminishment of the industry that defined it? The answer, I found, falls somewhere in between. But it’s also something more. Built on the sweat and dreams of immigrants, forged in revolutionary politics, honed and strengthened through periods of crime, decay, and hardship, Ybor City is America in microcosm. And by honoring its past, it is forging a bright future indeed.