The platform stood in the middle of the factory floor, taller than a man, and from it a single voice carried over the rows of workers. He read the morning newspaper first, then a chapter of a novel, then a labor pamphlet, and the only sound underneath him was the soft, ceaseless click of blades cutting tobacco leaf. Hundreds of Cuban hands rolled cigars without looking up. This was Ybor City in its prime, where the workers paid the reader out of their own wages and voted on what he read, and where the smell of fermenting tobacco hung over brick streets that had been scrubland a generation before.
The Cubans who built it called it home before Tampa knew what to make of it. They came for the work, stayed for the cause, and left behind a neighborhood that still smells faintly of cigars on the right afternoon.
Ybor City: The Place
Ybor City sits about two miles northeast of downtown Tampa, a flat grid of brick streets and three-story factory buildings on land that was pine scrub and swamp in 1885. The historic core runs along 7th Avenue, lined with iron balconies and red brick, bounded roughly by Nuck Street and the old rail lines. The housing stock is dominated by the casita, a narrow shotgun cottage built by the thousands for cigar workers. Interstate 4 now slices east to west through the middle of it.
How Ybor City Became Cuban
Before the Cubans
There was almost nothing here before the cigars. In October 1885, Tampa’s Board of Trade put up a $5,000 subsidy to lure a Spanish-born cigar manufacturer named Vicente Martinez-Ybor north from Key West, where strikes and fires had made his life difficult. He bought 40 acres of scrubland outside the small town of Tampa, drained it, and laid out streets. Tampa annexed the new company town in 1887, and a place that had been mosquitoes and palmetto became, within a decade, the engine of the city’s growth.
The Cubans Arrive
Martinez-Ybor had learned the cigar trade in Havana, where he founded his El Principe de Gales brand in 1856 before fleeing Cuba’s first war of independence. When he moved his operation to Tampa, his workforce moved with him. The skilled rollers, the tabaqueros, were overwhelmingly Cuban, men and women who had learned to hand-roll a fine cigar in Havana and Key West and now carried that craft to the Gulf coast of Florida.
Chain migration did the rest. A roller who found steady work wrote home, and brothers, cousins, and whole families followed the same route from Havana through Key West to Ybor City. Spaniards came too, and Sicilians, each with their own quarter and their own story. The Spanish community that grew up alongside the Cubans in Ybor ran many of the factories and built grand social clubs of their own. But the rollers at the benches, the heart of the workforce that earned Tampa the title Cigar Capital of the World, were Cuban first.
His permanent brick factory opened in 1886 at what is now 1911 North 13th Street, and at the time it was the largest cigar factory in the world. Other manufacturers followed, and the rows of brick factories filled with thousands of workers rolling by hand at long wooden tables.
Ybor City at Its Peak
By the 1920s, dozens of factories ran across Ybor City and neighboring West Tampa, and the daily ritual of the floor was unlike any other industry in America. Cigar making was quiet, skilled, repetitive work, and to fill the silence the rollers hired a lector, a reader, who sat on a raised platform and read aloud all day. The workers paid his salary themselves, pooling a few cents each, and they voted on the material: a Havana newspaper in the morning, then serialized novels by Dumas or Cervantes, then political tracts and labor news in the afternoon.
Men like Victoriano Manteiga, who later founded the Spanish-language newspaper La Gaceta, made their names on those platforms. The lector turned a factory of illiterate workers into one of the best-informed working classes in the country. It also turned every floor into a political seminar, which is exactly why the owners would later come to fear it.
That informed working class became the fuel of a revolution. On November 26, 1891, a slight, intense lawyer named Jose Marti stood at the Liceo Cubano in Ybor City and delivered the speech remembered by its closing vow, with all, and for the good of all. Over the next three years he returned to Tampa roughly twenty times, raising money a few cents at a time from the rollers, who pledged a day’s pay to the cause, and in 1892 he founded the Cuban Revolutionary Party with much of its program drafted in Tampa.
Spanish agents tried to stop him. In late 1892 they slipped poison into his wine, and Marti was carried to the boardinghouse of Paulina Pedroso, an Afro-Cuban woman who nursed him back to health and afterward let no one but herself prepare his food. She sold her own jewelry to fund the movement and walked arm in arm with Marti down 7th Avenue to make a point about who belonged in free Cuba.
Cigar production peaked in 1929, when the factories of Ybor City rolled some 500 million cigars in a single year. The neighborhood by then held tens of thousands of people, with bakeries selling Cuban bread by the yard, coffee stands on every corner, and mutual aid societies whose clubhouses rivaled any building downtown.
The Change
The trouble had been building for decades. Cuban rollers struck again and again over wages and dignity: a 98-day walkout in 1899 when owners installed scales to weigh their tobacco, a bitter strike in 1901 that ended with labor leaders deported by vigilantes, and another long strike in 1920. The Great Depression then cut the demand for hand-rolled luxury cigars almost overnight. Owners turned to rolling machines that did not need skilled hands, and in 1931 the last lector was silenced after a strike, the readers blamed for stirring up the floor. Demand recovered after World War II, but the factories had mechanized, and they did not rehire the artisans they had once employed by the thousands. Returning veterans left the aging neighborhood for newer suburbs.
Then came the bulldozers. The federal urban renewal program of the 1960s razed block after block of casitas and factories, promising a revival that never arrived, and the construction of Interstate 4 cut straight through the center of Ybor City, demolishing homes and severing the north-south streets. Where there had been a dense Cuban neighborhood, there were now empty lots and a highway.
The Landmarks of Ybor City
The Ybor Factory Building (1911 North 13th Street) was the first brick cigar factory in the neighborhood, opened by Vicente Martinez-Ybor in 1886 and once the largest in the world. It was on the steps of this factory that thousands of cigar workers gathered to hear speeches for Cuban independence. The building survives today, having passed through use as a restaurant and offices.
El Circulo Cubano de Tampa (Palm Avenue at 14th Street), the Cuban Club, traces its roots to 1902 and the older Club Nacional Cubano. The first clubhouse burned in 1916, and the membership, then around 2,600 strong, funded the grand building that opened in 1917, designed by architect M. Leo Elliott with a theater, ballroom, library, pharmacy, gym, and bowling lanes. It was a Cuban town hall, hospital plan, and dance floor under one roof.
La Union Marti-Maceo was founded by Afro-Cubans pushed out of the main Cuban club in 1900 when, under pressure from Florida’s segregation laws, the club voted to exclude its Black members. Twenty-four of them walked out and formed their own society, named for Jose Marti and the Afro-Cuban general Antonio Maceo. In 1908 they built a hall with a theater seating 900, the largest facility open to Black residents in Tampa. Urban renewal demolished that building in 1965, and the society relocated to a smaller home near Marti Park, where it endures as a keeper of Afro-Cuban memory.
Parque Amigos de Jose Marti (1303 East 8th Avenue) stands on the lot where Paulina Pedroso ran the boardinghouse that sheltered Marti. The land was deeded to the government of Cuba in 1956 by a Cuban couple, Manuel Quevedo Jaureguizar and Mercedes Carillo la Guardia, out of love for their homeland, making this small park the only patch of ground in the United States owned by Cuba. It holds soil brought from every province of the island.
The Columbia Restaurant (2117 East 7th Avenue) opened in 1905, founded by Casimiro Hernandez Sr., a Spaniard who had come from Cuba a few years earlier. It began as a corner cafe where cigar workers could rest over Spanish and Cuban dishes or grab a sandwich for the bench. It grew to fill a city block and is now Florida’s oldest restaurant, still run by the founding family.
El Reloj, the J.C. Newman cigar factory on 16th Street, was built in 1910 and is the last working cigar factory of the roughly 150 that once filled Tampa. Inside, cigars are still rolled by hand and on antique machines, the last living thread of the industry the Cubans built.
Where the Ybor City Cubans Came From
The rollers came overwhelmingly from Havana and the tobacco towns of western Cuba, by way of Key West. They were urban, skilled, and politically literate, a working class shaped by the craft of the cigar and by the long Cuban struggle against Spanish rule. Many had already migrated once, from Havana to Key West in the 1860s and 1870s, before following Martinez-Ybor north to Tampa.
A distinct thread within them was Afro-Cuban. Paulina Pedroso, born enslaved in Consolacion del Sur in Pinar del Rio in 1855, was one of many Black Cubans who came through Key West to Ybor City in 1892. They rolled cigars at the same benches as white Cubans and fought for the same independence, only to be forced into separate institutions once they arrived. The story of Ybor’s Cubans is inseparable from the story of who got to belong, a thread that also runs through the later Cuban exile communities in Little Havana in Miami and Union City in New Jersey.
Ybor City Today
The factories are quiet, but the neighborhood is loud again. 7th Avenue is a national historic district, its brick storefronts now full of bars, coffee shops, and tattoo studios, and on weekend nights it draws crowds the way the cigar floors once drew workers. Wild chickens strut down the sidewalks, descendants of the birds kept in Cuban backyards a century ago, protected now by a city ordinance and tended by a local chicken society.
The old social clubs have been restored and reopened for weddings and concerts, and the Ybor City Museum State Park, set in the former Ferlita Bakery on 9th Avenue, keeps a restored casita open so visitors can see how a roller’s family lived. The Cuban sandwich, born in these workers’ cafes and built Tampa-style with a layer of Genoa salami, now has its own annual festival, and the debate over whether Tampa or Miami invented it shows no sign of cooling. The deviled crab, a spiced crab croquette that workers ate cheap during the long 1920 strike, is still sold from neighborhood windows. The Columbia still serves, and El Reloj still rolls.
What the Cubans of Ybor City made was never only cigars. It was a place where workers funded their own education from a platform on the factory floor, where an exiled poet found the money and the men to start a revolution, and where a Black boardinghouse keeper sheltered him from assassins. That story is still being told on the same brick streets, in the same accents, under the same Florida sun.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why did Cubans settle in Ybor City?
Cubans settled in Ybor City because Vicente Martinez-Ybor moved his cigar manufacturing operation there from Key West in 1885, and his skilled Cuban workforce followed the jobs. The Cubans in Ybor City were mostly tabaqueros, cigar rollers, who had learned the craft in Havana and Key West. Chain migration brought their families along the same route for decades.
Is Ybor City still Cuban today?
Ybor City is no longer a working-class Cuban neighborhood, but its Cuban heritage is everywhere: in the restored Cuban Club, the Cuban sandwich, Marti Park, and the free-roaming chickens descended from residents’ backyards. The cigar factories are mostly silent, with J.C. Newman’s El Reloj the last one still rolling. Today it is a nightlife and dining district built inside the original brick shell.
What are the most famous landmarks of Ybor City?
The best-known landmarks are El Circulo Cubano, the 1917 Cuban Club; Parque Amigos de Jose Marti, the only land in the United States owned by Cuba; and the Columbia Restaurant, Florida’s oldest, opened in 1905. The original Ybor Factory Building of 1886 and the still-operating El Reloj cigar factory round out the cigar-era sites.
Where did the Ybor City Cubans come from?
The Cubans in Ybor City came overwhelmingly from Havana and the tobacco-growing region of western Cuba, almost always by way of Key West. They were a skilled, urban, and politically engaged working class. Afro-Cubans like Paulina Pedroso, born enslaved in Pinar del Rio, arrived along the same path and rolled cigars beside white Cubans.
When did Cubans first arrive in Ybor City?
Cubans first arrived in 1885 and 1886, when Vicente Martinez-Ybor founded his cigar town and brought his Cuban rollers from Key West. By the 1890s, Ybor City was a thriving Cuban community and a center of the Cuban independence movement, with Jose Marti visiting roughly twenty times between 1891 and 1894.
If your family’s story passed through the cigar factories of Ybor City, through Key West before that, or through Havana before that, the brick streets of Tampa hold a chapter of it.