Key West Cigar Era in Florida

The Key West cigar industry dates from 1831, was critical to the island's economy just before the twentieth century, and declined in the early 1900s as manufacturers moved to Tampa (Cruz House marker; Gato factory marker).

The state marker for the Alexander Cruz House on East Street dates the Key West cigar industry from 1831, when the first cigar factory was established (Florida Division of Historical Resources). The State Archives of Florida describes commercial cigar rolling reaching Florida in the 1830s as small operations started by Cuban immigrants (Florida Memory). The same Key West marker says the industry boomed after the 1868 Cuban War of Independence and reached its zenith at the turn of the twentieth century (Cruz House marker).

Florida sources put the Key West peak at different points. The State Archives of Florida counts more than 100 factories in Key West at the height of the industry in the 1880s (Florida Memory), while the Cruz House marker places the zenith around 1900. Eduardo H. Gato was still building in Key West in 1916, when he constructed a poured concrete factory to replace an earlier wood frame factory that burned (Gato factory marker).

Cuban cigar makers came to Key West to escape war in Cuba and to make authentic Cuban cigars in America while avoiding the high tariff levied against products from Havana (State Archives of Florida; Florida Memory).

Hostilities between the Spanish colonial government and Cuban nationalists began in the 1860s, and in 1867 alone more than 100,000 Cubans fled the island, the largest portion of them from the class of skilled laborers that had emerged in Havana around the cigar industry, many of whom went directly to Florida (State Archives of Florida). The Museum of Florida History, part of the Florida Department of State, says many of the island's cigar makers immigrated to Key West during the Ten Years War of 1868 to 1879 (Museum of Florida History).

The clear Cuban model in Key West began with a New York manufacturer. German immigrant Samuel Seidenberg established the first clear Cuban cigar factory in Key West in 1867, using Cuban laborers to roll Cuban tobacco while avoiding the tariff on Havana products and Spanish trade restrictions (Florida Memory). The National Park Service says new American tariffs on imported cigars and political trouble in Cuba compelled Cuban manufacturers to build factories in the United States in the late nineteenth century (National Park Service).

The State Archives of Florida describes a strong natural link between the cigar workers of Key West and Havana, and by the early 1890s 50,000 to 100,000 people traveled back and forth annually (State Archives of Florida). The steamer Olivette, built in 1886 for Henry B. Plant, ran between Tampa, Key West and Havana in winter and brought tobacco out of Cuba for Tampa cigar factories just prior to an embargo (Florida Memory).

Florida state sources name Samuel Seidenberg, Vicente Martinez Ybor, Eduardo Gato and the Cruz brothers among the Key West cigar manufacturers (Florida Memory; Gato House marker).

Vicente Martinez Ybor established a cigar factory in Key West in 1869 after he fled Cuba when colonial authorities discovered his connections with revolutionaries (State Archives of Florida). The National Park Service records that Ybor had founded the Prince of Wales brand in Cuba and moved his factories first to Key West and New York City in the late 1860s (National Park Service). The state archives give 1869 for the Key West factory; the park service gives only the late 1860s.

Eduardo H. Gato came to Key West in 1874 and built the island's foremost cigar factory, where millions of cigars made from tobacco imported from Cuba were hand rolled and boxed for shipment worldwide, according to the state marker at his Duval Street house (Florida Division of Historical Resources). The marker credits Gato with Key West's change from a small fishing town to one of Florida's wealthiest cities, and lists him as vice president of the Key West Bank and owner of the horse drawn Key West Street Car (Gato House marker).

Family firms appear in the state record as well. The Cruz brothers, Andres, Alexander and Jose, erected a three story cigar factory on an East Street corner lot by 1889, serving as both business and family residence (Cruz House marker). The State Archives of Florida also holds a photograph of the Rippa Bros. cigar store and factory, run by a family that came to Key West from Romania in the late 1880s (Florida Memory).

Key West cigar work was skilled hand rolling in factories where a lector read aloud, and where trade unions and the Cuban independence cause were strong (Museum of Florida History; State Archives of Florida).

The lector was a fellow factory worker, usually selected by the workers themselves, who read aloud during work hours to help pass the time (Florida Memory). Lectors read all sorts of materials from fiction to news articles, and their choices were often pro union and in favor of Cuban independence (Florida Memory).

Many workers who immigrated to Key West had been on the vanguard of militant trade unionism in Cuba, using general strikes to win collective demands (State Archives of Florida). After the failed Cuban revolution of 1868, both the nationalist movement and union strength grew in Key West, and within a decade strikes were commonplace (Florida Memory).

The Florida marker at the Gato factory calls it one of the earliest American integrated workplaces, where Cuban, African and Bahamian Americans and whites worked side by side while their children attended the same school (Gato factory marker). Small cottages built near the Key West factory to house workers became an area known as Gatoville (Gato factory marker), or the Barrio de Gato (Gato House marker).

Social and patriotic clubs, first in Key West and then in Ybor City and West Tampa, were an important source of money for the Cuban revolutionary movement, and Jose Marti toured Key West delivering speeches to large crowds (Florida Memory). In 1898 the Army of the Cuban Republic included 150 Cubans from Key West (State Archives of Florida), and Gato factory workers raised funds to free Cuba from Spain (Gato factory marker).

The Key West cigar industry moved to Tampa because of repeated strikes, the 1886 fire and Tampa's land, rail and steamship links, with Vicente Martinez Ybor leaving after the 1885 strike (Museum of Florida History).

The Museum of Florida History says labor unrest, a major strike in 1885 and a massive fire the next year caused many manufacturers to leave Key West (Museum of Florida History). With personal underwriting by members of the Tampa Board of Trade, Ybor bought 40 acres for $4,000 in 1885 and moved his Key West operation there (State Archives of Florida). Henry Plant's new railroad connected the small town of Tampa to the rest of the country, and steamships could bring tobacco leaves from Cuba for the cigar factories (Florida Memory).

The departures from Key West continued for two decades. Prolonged strikes in 1889 and the early 1890s, on top of the 1886 fire, spurred more factories to relocate (Florida Memory). Over the next two decades, cigar workers became increasingly organized and strikes more frequent, helping to push more manufacturers to leave Key West, mostly resettling in the Tampa Bay area (Florida Memory).

Storms and fire kept hitting the Key West factories that stayed. The State Archives of Florida holds photographs of the Nichols cigar factory wrecked by a 1909 hurricane (Florida Memory) and the Gato factory at Simonton and Virginia streets after the 1915 fire that destroyed it (Florida Memory). In Tampa, machines that could mass produce cigars, the economic collapse of the 1930s and the rising popularity of cigarettes hurt the industry by the mid 1930s, and the 1962 embargo of Cuban tobacco marked the end of the Cuban cigar in the United States (Museum of Florida History).

Tampa became the capital for the manufacture of fine, hand rolled cigars using imported Cuban tobacco. At its peak in the 1920s about 10,000 people worked in the Tampa cigar industry (Museum of Florida History), and the National Park Service notes that Ybor City was once known as the Cigar Capital of the World and is now a National Historic Landmark district (National Park Service).

The Gato Cigar Factory at 1100 Simonton Street in Key West, a poured concrete building from 1916, was obtained by Monroe County in 1998 (Gato factory marker).

The Florida marker at the Gato factory says it was sold to the Department of the Navy in 1942 for barracks and a cafeteria and later ran the Navy Commissary there until 1989; Monroe County obtained the property in 1998 and completed a rehabilitation in 2001 (Florida Division of Historical Resources). The Gato House marker dates the fireproof Simonton Street factory to 1917 instead, a one year gap between two state markers (Gato House marker).

The Florida Department of Health in Monroe County announced on January 15, 2025 that it would start reopening the Gato Building for limited services, with clinic operations expected on January 21, 2025 and Vital Statistics on January 23, 2025 (DOH Monroe). Two Key West homes carry state markers: the Eduardo H. Gato House at 1327 Duval Street, built about 1894 (Gato House marker), and the Alexander Cruz House on East Street, a contributing building in the Key West Historic District (Cruz House marker).

The Museum of Florida History holds more than 1,500 cigar box labels dating from the late 1800s through the mid 1900s (Museum of Florida History). The museum is closed for repairs to the plaza level of the R.A. Gray Building as of October 15, 2026 (Museum of Florida History), while the label gallery on its collections page remains online.