In Florida: Soft Whiffs of Memory

By Cristina Garcia

Carmela Cammarata's stained brown fingers have a life of their own. Nimbly stretching Honduran corojo tobacco leaves with moistened fingertips, she strips the stems with a flat, semicircular blade. Then she expertly rolls the golden leaves around bunched-up filler into fragrant cylinders that could make a cigar lover cry. Rolling cigars comes as naturally and rhythmically to her as drumming fingers on a kitchen table. "I shouldn't be working anymore," says Cammarata, who has been making cigars for 65 of her 80 years. "But I love to make cigars. In my day it was tobacco, tobacco, tobacco. There wasn't anything else."

Cammarata is one of only a few handrollers left from Ybor City, a Tampa neighborhood that boasted some 300 cigar factories and 30,000 workers during its heyday in the 1920s. The handrollers, who now make their specialties only for tourists or connoisseurs, are descendants of Cuban cigar makers who came to the city in the 1880s after a fire destroyed their operations in Key West. Spaniards and Italians joined the 400 million-cigars-a-year business, forging a unique tricultural environment that persists to this day.

At Joe Faedo's bakery in West Tampa, a gaggle of old-timers, organized as the West Tampa Political Group, meet every morning at 8:30, as they have for nearly 60 years, to discuss local politics and catch up on the gossip. Many of the group's members worked as cigar makers in their youth, then moved on to other jobs as the industry declined. Retired plumbers, electricians, dentists, tailors, lawyers, teachers and bakers now fill the group's ranks.

Over the years, the group has endorsed umpteen political candidates, taking them around to meet factory workers as well as the movers and shakers in the Latin community. Led by an 80-year-old former cigar maker named Virgilio Fabian, the men are virulently Democratic, a sharp contrast to the largely conservative Cubans only a couple of hundred miles away in Miami. Earlier this spring the group rallied around the presidential candidacy of Albert Gore. Since Gore dropped out of the race, the new favorite is Michael Dukakis.

On a recent morning the West Tampa Political Group's steering committee -- some 30 men, many in their 70s and 80s -- chatted excitedly with three local politicians who stopped by for a little backslapping. "Everyone knows what he is supposed to do," Fabian told his attentive troops as he introduced them to an aspiring tax accessory. "We have to fight hard for this man and make sure no one loses his home because of high taxes."

The men sipped their cafe con leche and bit hungrily into freshly baked Cuban bread spread thick with butter. Wax-lined baskets of bollitos, deep- fried balls of ground black-eyed peas, were passed around. "Eat, eat. No ^ diets allowed here," they coaxed one another in Spanish. Still, their well- spoken English is an accented blend of Southern drawl and Latin staccato.

"We know each other as well as we do ourselves," says Mario Sanchez, a dentist at the local Veterans Administration hospital. He points over at former Merchant Marine Charlie Antigua, who at 97 is the oldest member of the group. "See Charlie there. He likes his dentures real tight. He says he has a new girlfriend." Across the table, Pedro Tomas Lopez, 76, reminisces about his early days as a rabble-rousing union organizer in the cigar factories. "The bosses would fire me when they found out who I was," he says with a satisfied grin.

Even more respected than the union leaders in those days were the lectores, or readers. Cigar workers contributed 25 cents a week to pay these so-called princes of the factories to read to them while they worked. Perched on a platform high above the cigar rollers, the lector (who earned the then exorbitant salary of $80 a week) would usually spend two hours in the morning reading newspapers and periodicals. After a hearty lunch, he would resume in the afternoon with the classics. The works of Victor Hugo, Cervantes, Emile Zola, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Shakespeare were all eagerly absorbed.

The lectores used to hook the workers with popular novels, leaving everyone in suspense for the next installment and substantially cutting down on absenteeism to boot. "On hot days," recalls Henry Aparicio, 72, whose father was a famous reader from Spain, "the people who lived close to the factory would sometimes sit outside with parasols, knitting and sewing, trying to find out how the soap operas were going to end."

The cigar workers pooled their resources to establish hospitals and mutual- aid societies. They built elaborate ethnic clubs complete with cafes, ballrooms and theaters, some of which attracted the best opera singers and actresses of the day from Spain, Italy and Cuba. "The culture of the cigar worker was evolved to a degree hardly found elsewhere in the proletariat," says County Historian Anthony Pizzo.

By the early 1930s, however, cigar-factory owners began barring the lectores from the premises for reading subversive materials. Long strikes by active new unions did little to bring the lectores back or to stop the inevitable progression toward mechanization. "One machine took care of a whole row of twelve people," says Delia De Caprio, owner of Joe Faedo's bakery. Her parents were both cigar workers. The Depression finished off what the unions and machines started.

After World War II, Ybor City went downhill. Urban renewal bulldozed many of the old cigar workers' homes, stripping away the heart of the community. During the 1970s artists started moving into the cheap-rent area. Then, in 1972, Local Developer Harris Mullen bought up the old Vincente Martinez Ybor Cigar Factory and converted it into a collection of shops and restaurants. That signaled the beginning of a revitalization for the sorely decayed neighborhood.

Another team of developers, Shirley and Alan Kahana, is renovating El Pasaje, a historic building once known as the best bordello in the Southeast. It was also home to the Cherokee Club, a famous hangout for cigar magnates and their friends, which over the years played host to such renowned lovers of the leaf as Teddy Roosevelt, Grover Cleveland and Winston Churchill. The Kahanas have restored the magnificent ballroom on the second floor and are converting the "gentlemen's hotel" portion into office space.

More and more, the remaining Ybor City cigar makers are bringing their grandchildren and great-grandchildren back to their old neighborhood for a look around or a day at one of the frequent festivals that celebrate the neighborhood's rich heritage. When they close their eyes and take a deep, long breath, they claim, they can still smell the sweet aroma of cigars.