Ybor City: The Anarchist Cigar Capital

At its peak in the early twentieth century, the cigar factories of Ybor City in Tampa were rolling as many as five hundred million cigars per year. The workforce was overwhelmingly Cuban, Spanish, and Italian. They had brought with them something American employers were not expecting.

In the middle of a factory floor, on a raised platform, a man sat at a desk and read aloud. He was the lector, the professional reader, hired collectively by the workers themselves from their own wages. He read newspapers in the morning: the labor press, the anarchist press, the news from Cuba. In the afternoon, he read novels. The literature ranged from Victor Hugo to Emile Zola to Tolstoy. Some factories worked through the complete plays of Shakespeare. The lector was paid from a fund managed by the workers, not the owners, and the workers voted on what was read.

This arrangement, which had its origins in Cuban cigar culture, produced what labor historians have described as arguably the most politically literate manual workforce in the United States at that time. The workers of Ybor City organized mutual-aid societies they called centros, which ran their own hospitals, pharmacies, sports leagues, and burial insurance funds, independent of both employer and government. The Centro Asturiano, the Centro Español, and the Italian mutual-aid society L'Unione Italiana each operated full medical facilities.

José Martí, the Cuban poet and independence organizer, spoke in Ybor City in eighteen ninety-one and eighteen ninety-two, raising money from the cigar workers for the Cuban revolution. The industry began its decline after nineteen thirty, as machine rolling undercut hand rolling. In nineteen thirty-one, the factory owners tried to abolish the lector system through a lockout. The workers struck for six months and eventually lost. The readers fell silent.

The buildings are still there, their terracotta facades and wrought-iron balconies running for blocks. The centros, some of them, still hold events.