Martí's Ybor: Where Cuban Independence Was Born

November of eighteen ninety-one. José Martí stepped off the train at Ybor City and into a crowd that already knew who he was.

He had come from New York, where he lived in exile, working as a journalist and correspondent for newspapers across Latin America. He had been writing about Cuba's liberation for a decade. But it was in Tampa, not Havana, not New York, not Paris, that the organizational machinery of Cuban independence would be assembled.

The cigar workers of Ybor City were already deeply political. They had been shaped by years of lectores reading radical newspapers aloud in the factories. Many of them were Cuban exiles themselves, people who had fled Spanish rule and were now hand-rolling tobacco for wages while waiting for a moment that might never come. Martí understood what he had in this community. He called the cigar workers the soul of Cuba in exile.

At the invitation of the Club Ignacio Agramonte, he gave two speeches in Ybor City. The first was called With All and for the Good of All. The second was The New Pines. They were not the oratory of a general promising military victory. They were a vision of what Cuba should be after independence: a republic without racial hierarchy, without the class divisions that had crippled Latin American independence movements elsewhere.

Martí and local organizers worked to build support for the Cuban Revolutionary Party. The party's founding principles were adopted in Key West in January of eighteen ninety-two, backed by cigar workers who contributed a day's wages to the cause.

Martí visited Tampa repeatedly before his death in combat in Cuba in eighteen ninety-five. The organization he built in Ybor City funded the invasion that ended Spanish colonial rule. The revolution was financed in twenty-five-cent increments by men and women who rolled cigars eight hours a day and sent a portion of each paycheck to the future.