Ybor City

YBOR CITY. Presently part of Tampa, Florida, Ybor City was a planned community begun in 1885 by cigar industrialist Vicente Martinez Ybor, the cigar industry provided the context for the community’s initial radical orientation. Cuban and Spanish cigar workers brought to Florida a well-developed proletarian consciousness and a firm commitment to leftist political and labor ideologies. Joined soon by Sicilian immigrants, many of whom had belonged to socialist-led workers’ leagues (fasci dei lavoratori) in the 1890s, “Latin” immigrants fashioned a radical culture of unusual complexity, durability, and diversity.

The Tampa area was frequently visited by José Martí whose Partido Revolucionario Cubano was the motor of the Cuban independence movement. Martí worked closely with Carlos Baliño and Vicente Diego Tejera, founders of Cuban socialism who were then active among U.S.-based Cuban workers. Though the Cuban communities in South Florida and New York were roughly the same size, Tampa generated eighty-three affiliates of the Partido Revolucionario Cubano to New York’s thirteen. Baliño later organized a revolutionary community of fifty Cuban families in Thomasville, Georgia, and, later still, was mayor of radical Martí City, Florida. The Cuban socialist commented that Martí was no socialist proper but an ardent and trustworthy ally. A correspondent for the New York Sun for more than a decade, Martí founded his own newspaper, Patria, in 1892, mainly supported by contributions from tobacco workers in Florida.

By the twentieth century, Ybor City possessed a full spectrum of radical debating clubs, political groups, reading societies, consumer cooperatives, and newspapers. Adherents of virtually every leftist viewpoint could be found in the community, including right- and left-wing socialists, centrists, revolutionary and Industrial Workers of the World syndicalists, and pacifistic and “propaganda of the deed” anarchists. The strength and pervasiveness of radical ideologies could be measured in part by the weakness of organized religion, which struggled for decades to acquire membership and respect. Ybor City quickly integrated itself into a worldwide network of radical settlements, becoming a regular stop on the propaganda tours of various luminaries and maintaining close links with outside events and personalities.

Nowhere was the radical presence more in evidence than in the cigar industry itself. All large factories possessed readers (lectores) who read to workers during the day. Drawing from the works of leftist masters, proletarian novels, and labor tracts, readers were critical elements in the politicization of workers.

Ybor City’s militant cigar unions emerged from this environment. Socialists such as Giovanni Vaccaro and anarchists such as Pedro Esteve and Alfonso Coniglio played important leadership roles in organizing workers and directing them in industry-wide strikes. Major walkouts occurred in 1899, 1901, 1910, 1920, and 1931, with numerous smaller confrontations taking place in other years. The radical presence—in unions, factories, and the general community—contributed to the strength of employer and native hostility, which often took the form of vigilantism, nativism, and violence. Defeat in the ten-month 1920 strike, the shocks of Red Scare repression, and the collapse of the 1931 strike (led by the Communist Tobacco Workers International Union) seriously eroded the labor position and community standing of the leftists. Anticommunist drives of the 1950s continued the deterioration. Nevertheless, as late as 1948 Henry Wallace carried three of the Ybor City precincts.

Even after radical decline, Ybor City manifested a leftist orientation, as seen in such aspects as support for antifascism, labor unionism, and left-of-center politics. Few post-Castro Cuban émigrés chose Tampa for settlement, further testimony of the enduring image and makeup of the community

Hewitt, Nancy A. Southern Discomfort: Women’s Activism in Tampa, Florida, 1880s-1920s. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003.

Ingalls, Robert P. and Louis A. Perez. Tampa Cigar Workers: A Pictorial History. Gainsville: University Press of Florida, 2003.

Mormino, Gary R., and George E. Pozzetta. The Immigrant World of Ybor City: Italians and Their Latin Neighbors in Tampa, 1885–1985. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987.

Perez, Louis A., Jr. “Reminiscences of a Lector: Cuban Cigar Workers in Tampa.” Florida Historical Quarterly 53 (April 1975).

Pozzetta, George E. “An Immigrant Library: The Tampa Italian Club Collection.” Ex Libris 1 (1978).