Tampa's Cuban Cigar Era, 1886 to the 1930s

Tampa's hand-rolled cigar era ran from the first Ybor City factories of 1886 to the collapse of the early 1930s, peaking in the 1920s (National Park Service).

Growth can be read in the Tampa port's books. Import and export duties collected there rose from $683.08 in 1885 to more than $83,000 three years later, more than $787,000 in 1896 and over $871,000 in 1900, a climb the Ybor City nomination ties to the cigar trade (Ybor City Historic District nomination). Ybor City alone held about 6,000 people by 1890, more than the native residents of Tampa, and West Tampa grew into a second cigar town with box factories and printing plants of its own.

Cigar makers came to Tampa to make Cuban-style cigars inside the United States, escaping tariffs on Havana imports and the labor fights of Key West, with a port and railroad already in place (Florida Memory, NPS nomination).

The NPS district page also names new American tariffs on imported cigars and political trouble in Cuba as the push (National Park Service). The method was older than Tampa. Florida Memory credits Samuel Seidenberg with the first clear Cuban factory, in Key West in 1867, using Cuban workers and Cuban tobacco to avoid high tariffs on Havana goods and Spain's trade limits; Vicente Martinez Ybor opened his own Key West factory in 1869 after fleeing Cuba (Florida Memory exhibit). The NPS adds that Ybor supported Cuban independence and also ran a factory in New York City (NPS).

Key West's isolation and frequent strikes made it a hard base. In 1885 Ybor and fellow manufacturer Ignacio Haya toured Tampa and, according to the nomination, recognized the potential in its excellent port and recently completed railroad line, and the nomination quotes Cuban historian Jose Rivero Muniz on a climate much like Cuba's (NHL nomination). When Ybor's Key West factory burned in early 1886, he put everything into Tampa: Gavino Gutierrez laid out the factory town, and the Ybor Land and Improvement Company, organized that October, sold factory sites to rival makers.

Rivals followed. The NPS lists Armo, Garcial and Company; Trujillo and Benemelis; and Arguilles, Lopez and Brothers among the Latin manufacturers who joined Ybor and Haya in Tampa (National Park Service).

Over 3,000 cigar workers brought in from Cuba, some 15% of them Black, had reached Ybor City by the end of 1886, and Spaniards and Sicilians followed in later years (NHL nomination).

Ybor built 176 worker houses that first year and bought a streetcar line to Tampa (Ybor City nomination). Cubans dominated the cigar trade; Spaniards from Asturias and Galicia arrived in numbers in the 1890s; Sicilians mostly went into small business and farming. The nomination says several early cigar box labels were made by German lithographers, and that hundreds of small shops called chinchales, or Buckeyes for their southern Ohio tobacco, employed a handful of workers each and produced cigars of lower quality.

The NPS describes the big factories as brick or stone buildings of two to four stories, with packing and shipping on the first floor, rolling on the second and brand blending on the third (NPS). Ybor City's skilled factory workers rolled cigars by hand in 36 shapes and sizes. After 1900, Florida Memory notes, large American corporations such as the American Cigar Company and the Duke Tobacco Trust bought many Tampa factories and added production quotas, which drew more resistance and more strikes (Florida Memory).

Lectores were fellow factory workers, usually selected by the workers themselves, who read aloud during work hours; Florida Memory says the major Tampa companies banned them by 1931 after years of dispute (Florida Memory).

Readings ran from fiction to news, but the State Archives exhibit says the choices were often pro-union, in favor of Cuban independence and, in Tampa, increasingly leftist and anti-corporation (Florida Memory exhibit). Jose Marti made several speechmaking trips to Ybor City to raise money and troops; many cigar workers contributed a day's pay to the cause each week, and in most of the factories the lectores used patriotic texts (NHL nomination).

Labor organizing was built in. La Resistencia, founded in 1895, linked Tampa and Havana workers and led strikes in 1899 and 1901, after which the Cigar Makers' International Union became Tampa's chief cigar union (Florida Memory). On November 26, 1931, Ybor City cigar makers walked out over poor treatment and the owners' decision to ban lectors (Florida Memory timeline); the nomination says a major strike in 1931 contributed to change and that the owners brought in many lower-paid native workers and removed the lectores (NPS).

Sources disagree on the final date. A 1941 Writers' Program transcript on Florida Memory says the custom of professional readers was abolished in 1932 because, it is said, the lectors read so much literature of a radical nature that they kept the factories on the verge of strike most of the time (WPA Stories: Ybor City), while the exhibit says the major companies banned lectors by 1931 and the timeline dates the strike over the ban to November 26, 1931. The transcript was compiled in 1941 by the Writers' Program of the Work Projects Administration and the exhibit is a modern State Archives page; both are hosted on Florida Memory, so both years are given here.

Cigarettes, cigar machines, a smear campaign against hand rolling, the 1931 strike and the economic collapse of the 1930s dealt Tampa's hand-rolled industry a blow from which it never recovered, according to the Ybor City nomination (NHL nomination).

In the prosperous 1920s, cigarette sales climbed largely unnoticed, and new machinery could finally match hand work. Because buyers trusted the Tampa hand-rolled product, producers of machine-made cigars launched what the nomination calls a notorious spit campaign, with advertisements claiming human saliva played a major role in hand manufacture (Ybor City nomination). Large factories either mechanized or went out of business, and the NPS says only small shops were able to continue the handcrafting tradition (nomination, NPS).

People followed the jobs out. Between 1930 and 1940, one quarter of Tampa's foreign-born whites and more than half of its Afro-Cubans left the city (National Park Service nomination). Cigar making recovered during World War II, yet Ybor City kept declining, and an urban renewal project launched in 1965 led to the demolition of a large portion of the community while also sparking a revival of interest in preserving it.

Nine key cigar factories survive in the Ybor City Historic District, and one large factory on 16th Street still produces cigars (National Park Service).

The NPS names that working building as the E. Regensberg and Sons factory, also called S. Fernandez and Co., on 16th Street, the only large factory in Ybor City still producing cigars (NPS).

The landmark is the red brick Ybor Factory Complex on 14th Street, which takes up nearly an entire city block; the nomination traces it from the Ybor-Manrara factory of 1886 to the American Cigar Company, 1901 to 1954, and Hav-A-Tampa, 1955 to 1972 (NHL nomination). The Havana-American factory at 2205 N. 20th Street, finished in 1895, is the second oldest masonry cigar factory in Ybor City, and the Robert Monne and Brothers building of about 1890 is the only all-frame factory left.

J.C. Newman Cigar Co. describes its 1910 El Reloj factory in Ybor City as the last traditional cigar factory still operating in the United States, a claim made by the company about itself (J.C. Newman). Ybor City Museum State Park, in the historic Ferlita Bakery at 1818 E. Ninth Ave., tells the cigar story and is open 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. Wednesday through Sunday for $4 a person, with children 5 and younger admitted free, phone 813-247-6323 (Florida State Parks).

For research, USF Libraries, whose Tampa location is listed at 4101 USF Apple Dr (813-974-2729), holds the Tony Pizzo Collection, 245 boxes on Tampa's cigar community, and the Kane-Greenberg Lithography Collection of cigar labels and proof books from the late 19th century to the mid-1930s (USF Libraries).

Last verified: October 18, 2026, against the Ybor City National Historic Landmark nomination, the NPS district page, Florida Memory and the USF Libraries collection guide.