Florida Cuban Cuisine History

Cuban food in Florida began with the Key West cigar factories of the 1860s, then moved north with the cigar makers who built Ybor City outside Tampa in 1886 (Florida Memory; Library of Congress).

The State Archives of Florida dates the first clear Cuban cigar factory in Key West to 1867, when New York cigar manufacturer Samuel Seidenberg used Cuban laborers to roll Cuban tobacco, making authentic Cuban cigars in America while avoiding the high tariffs on products from Havana (Florida Memory cigar exhibit). Vicente Martinez Ybor first established a cigar factory in Key West in 1869 after fleeing Cuba, and after the failed Cuban revolution of 1868 the Cuban nationalist movement continued to grow in Key West.

The Library of Congress tells the move north: the Ybor Cigar Factory was built in 1886 just outside Tampa when Martinez Ybor moved his factory and workers, mainly Cuban Americans, out of Key West, creating Ybor City as a Cuban ethnic enclave that later became part of Tampa (Library of Congress American Folklife Center). The Florida Department of State counts Cuban culinary customs among the traditions, with Spanish, Greek, Minorcan, Jamaican and African American ones, that have been folded into the Florida collective food culture (Florida Department of State).

Ybor City grew as a cigar company community: in 1885 Vicente Martinez Ybor bought 40 acres near Tampa for $4,000, built the first cigar factory in the area, brought workers from Cuba, and built and rented houses to them (Florida Memory).

The State Archives of Florida records that a devastating fire in 1886 and prolonged, violent strikes in 1889 and the early 1890s pushed more factories to relocate, that Ybor City soon emerged as a vibrant and rapidly growing Spanish speaking community, and that the City of Tampa annexed it in 1887 (Florida Memory cigar exhibit). West Tampa, founded in 1892 as a competing cigar center, stayed independent until 1925. Inside the factories the lector, a fellow worker usually selected by the workers, read aloud during work hours, and the exhibit captions photographs of the Cuban Club, the Italian Club and the Spanish Club with the note that the social clubs played a great part in preserving the customs and traditions of the Latin people.

Bread is where the sound record is most concrete. In 1939 WPA folklorists Stetson Kennedy and Robert Cook recorded an Ybor City baker singing "La canción de panadería," a work song he learned and used on the job when pulling dough, which the Library of Congress explains means shaping the characteristic Cuban batards out of rounds of dough (Library of Congress). The fieldworkers often asked about work songs but found few, which made the bakery song a notable find.

Neither city invented it: USF Tampa Library curator Andy Huse said the Cuban sandwich appeared on Havana menus in the 1800s before it showed up in a Tampa restaurant, and in Cuba it was called a mixto, or a combination (University of South Florida).

USF describes the Tampa sandwich as layers of pork, sometimes salami, Swiss cheese, pickles and yellow mustard pressed hot between crusty Cuban bread (USF News). Both Tampa and Miami long claimed their Cuban immigrants invented it; Tampa insists it includes roast pork, ham and salami, and Miami argues salami should never be part of the recipe. Huse, curator of Florida Studies at the USF Tampa Library, said he was getting five or six calls a year about the dispute before he, USF Professor Bárbara Cruz and Jeff Houck published The Cuban Sandwich: A History in Layers in 2022.

Tampa still gets credit for popularizing the sandwich. The USF authors point out that Tampa had the largest Cuban population in the nation for more than half a century before Miami became the center of the culture in the 1960s, and in 2012 the Tampa City Council declared the Cuban sandwich the city's official signature sandwich (USF). USF also notes that National Cuban Sandwich Day has been celebrated every Aug. 23 since 2016, a holiday started by a USF journalism graduate.

The exodus that began with the Cuban Revolution of 1959 brought exiles who settled in the Little Havana section of Miami, where Cuban businesses quickly sprang up and Little Havana became the heart of the Miami Cuban exile enclave (University of Miami Libraries).

The University of Miami Cuban Heritage Collection records that refugees were arriving at 1,700 per week by the end of 1960, and that the U.S. Cuban Refugee Program of 1961 welcomed more than half a million exiles during the next two decades; its exhibit shows the Miami Freedom Tower as home of the Cuban Refugee Center (Cuban Heritage Collection). Exiles arriving in the early 1960s typically settled in the southwest section of the city that became known as Little Havana, and Cubans also moved to nearby Hialeah, drawn by jobs at Miami International Airport and in the nonunion garment industry (University of Miami Libraries).

Little Havana was not new Cuban ground. The University of Miami Institute for Public History notes that Cubans had lived there since the early part of the century, but the neighborhood remained predominantly white until the early 1960s, when exiles from Cuba and immigrants from other parts of Latin America began pouring in and transformed the culture of the neighborhood and of the city (University of Miami Institute for Public History). That timing matches the USF account of Tampa holding the largest Cuban population in the nation until Miami became the center of the culture in the 1960s (USF).

The record sits in public archives: the State Archives of Florida, the Florida Folklife Collection, the Library of Congress WPA recordings and the University of Miami Cuban Heritage Collection (Florida Memory; Florida Folklife Collection).

The Florida Memory exhibit "Florida Cigars: Artistry, Labor, and Politics in Florida's Oldest Industry" holds photographs of Tampa cigar workers selecting wrappers, the intersection of 14th Street and 9th Avenue in Ybor City and the Tampa social clubs (Florida Memory). The Florida Department of State Florida Folklife Collection keeps field notes, images and sound recordings from the Florida Folklife Program and the Florida Folk Festival, and includes a foodways section (Florida Folklife Collection). Last verified: October 15, 2026, on the Florida Memory, Florida Department of State, Library of Congress, USF and University of Miami Libraries websites.

The Library of Congress presentation Florida Folklife from the WPA Collections, 1938-1942, holds the Key West and Ybor City recordings, where folklorists Robert Cooke, Herbert Halpert, Stetson Kennedy and Alton Morris collected songs, stories and riddles in the Cuban American community (Library of Congress). The University of Miami Cuban Heritage Collection presents the refugee years in its online exhibit In Search of Freedom: Cuban Exiles and the U.S. Cuban Refugee Program (Cuban Heritage Collection), and the University of Miami Institute for Public History keeps a Little Havana oral history collection (Institute for Public History).