The Cigar Capital of the World

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The Cigar Capital of the World
Ybor City

By Eric Dusenbery


	Hand-rolling cigars is an age-old tradition that is still practiced in Ybor City.

At the turn of the century, La Sétima Avenida in Tampa's Ybor City bustled with traffic. Finished with the long day's work at cigar factories, Cuban immigrants headed for home or their club, El Circulo Cubano, while Italians, Germans and Spaniards added to the traffic and congestion as they made their way home or to their own clubs. Ybor City, the foremost cigar manufacturing community of the world, was flourishing.

Today, this lively Latin district attracts visitors with its unique history and distinctive atmosphere and architecture. The wrought-iron balconies, authentic globe streetlamps, coffeehouses, stores, boutiques and nightclubs of La Sétima Avenida (Seventh Avenue) have been compared to New Orleans' French Quarter. Here, cultural heritage is as important now as it was at the turn of the century.

It began when Don Vincente Martinez Ybor (E-bore) brought cigar-making to Tampa in 1885. Tired of labor unrest at his factory in Key West, Ybor, a Spaniard from the province of Valencia, bought 40 acres of land northeast of Tampa. The area's warm, humid climate was ideal for making cigars, and Tampa—already a manufacturing center—had a good transportation system of railroads and shipping ports.

Though he still had plenty of labor troubles as the unions sought to organize his workers, the Spaniard prospered with his cigar factory and soon built another, turning the old one over to his Cuban workers to use as a social center. Frank Glassitra, a local man known for tales of Ybor City's past, relates a story about it: "When Cuban revolutionary José Marti met with the Cubans at their club in 1895 or '96, he asked them to draw their chairs into a circle. Later they built a new club and called it El Circulo Cubano, or Cuban Circle, in honor of Marti."

Ybor City was filled with speakeasies where a man could get a drink of questionable quality and unquestioned illegality.

Ybor encouraged the building of more cigar factories in Ybor City, and they quickly attracted Cuban, Spanish, Italian, German and Jewish immigrants who either made cigars or opened businesses along La Sétima. At the industry's peak, Ybor City had 200 cigar factories with 12,000 tabaqueros (cigar makers) producing an estimated 700 million cigars a year.

But Ybor's past wasn't all tobacco. In 1898, during the Cuban Revolution, the U.S. army stationed thousands of men here, including Teddy Roosevelt and his Rough Riders, as Ybor City became a staging area for the U.S. military effort.

The town's prominence didn't last, though. Factories began making cigars with machines, people started smoking cigarettes instead of cigars, and the Great Depression of the 1930s emptied pockets while it emptied Ybor's factories and La Sétima. Frank Glassitra recalls those hard times. "Dad was a realtor in the Latin area, and his work ended with the Depression. One day in grammar school, in second grade, I remember I took two slices of bread with sugar in it. We alternated that with two slices of bread with pepper, vinegar and salt.

"People all over the country weren't smoking expensive cigars. Men started chewing tobacco, which was rare then," says Glassitra. With no money to spend, Ybor citizens became self-sufficient. They bought cows, planted gardens and fished. Glassitra's family dug up their St. Augustine grass and planted a garden.

Along with the Depression, there was Prohibition. Another way for unemployed tabaqueros to make a living was bootleg liquor, and Ybor City was filled with speakeasies where a man could get a drink of questionable quality and unquestioned illegality.

A few cigar companies managed to hang on through the Depression or started up as it began to loosen its grip on the nation's economy. Tampa Rico has been making hand-rolled cigars in Ybor City since 1939. The Livia Tobacco Company, in business since 1934, is owned by one of only two families left in the United States growing tobacco for cigar manufacturers. The U.S. tobacco comes from—surprisingly—Connecticut; the rest from Ecuador, Honduras, the Dominican Republic and Nicaragua. Company spokesman John Oliva says only a tiny percentage of Livia's tobacco goes to Ybor City cigar manufacturing.

Cigar-making still lingers in Ybor, but the end of the stogie's heyday cost the neighborhood its energy. An attempt at urban renewal failed to spark a resurgence in run-down Ybor City. In 1990, however, the neighborhood began making a comeback when it was named a National Historic Landmark District. Preservation and restoration became the rage, and Ybor City attracted trendy businesses and urban homesteaders wanting a chic new address.