Ybor City, Cigars, and Chickens

One of the things I wanted to do with Dear Husband while we were in Tampa was to tour Ybor City, the area's "Little Havana." I had hoped in the intervening year since our last trip that they would have completed the promised Tampa Baseball Museum. Alas, there is a beautiful website but no exhibits yet. Instead we settled on the charming little Ybor City State Museum, tucked into the old Ferlita bakery. 

Our original itinerary was to eat lunch in Ybor City--either at the famous Columbia Spanish restaurant or someplace that sold Cuban sandwiches--and then spend the afternoon looking around, but because it had been a lazy day of me getting a mani/pedi and DH baking a strawberry pie, we didn't actually arrive until nearly 4pm. We walked into the museum behind a family of five who spent as much time haggling over the price of entry as they ended up spending in the exhibit. (The mother had some sort of coupon the park officer had never heard of, so in the end they were charged $4 each, just like the rest of us.) While that drama unfolded, we watched a short documentary about Ybor City, which is named for Spanish-Cuban cigar magnate Vincente Martinez-Ybor (1818-1896). The city's seal (left) is comprised of the American, Cuban, Italian, and Spanish flags; the ship that brought the first cigar makers in 1886 (the Hutchinson); a tobacco leaf and a guava sprig; and a lit cigar whose smoke spells out the city's name. It was designed by historian Tony Pizzo in 1952. The guava are because that's what Spanish merchants were looking for when they came to the Tampa area; they ended up staying in this relatively underdeveloped area because Henry B. Plant had just extended the railroad to the western coast of Florida, which was sheltered from the worst of the Atlantic hurricanes.

What surprised us was how anti-labor the documentary and accompanying exhibits were. Ybor first moved his cigar manufacturing business out of Cuba to the Florida Keys due to the 10-year war with Spain (1868-1878); he moved from the Keys once a ferry came in the 1880s. I quote: "Then Ybor was no longer able to control his workforce." The video lauded Ybor and his fellow robber barons for developing Ybor's infrastructure--aka building a company town--although they do not appear to have stooped to the level of company scrip. Immigrants of all kinds were attracted to the area: Cubans and other Caribbean islanders, Jews/Germans, Italians. They tried very hard to establish a balance between inter-ethnic cohabitation and the realities of the Jim Crow South, including the fact that lighter-skinned Cubans and darker-skinned Cubans had to belong to different Associations. The video further omitted what the exhibit didn't: that the first day of work in Ybor's new factory was delayed because the common Cuban workers didn't want to labor under a Spanish foreman. The exhibit also blamed the development of cigar-worker unions with the death of the entire business sector in the 1930s. 

Something neat we learned was that the workers would hire a reader to sit above them and read the newspaper, novels, etc., to entertain them. The lector probably also commented on the roiling political situation in Cuba. Revolutionary Jose Marti spent a lot of time in Ybor City giving speeches and collecting money and supplies. In fact, the connection was so strong that since 1965, the country of Cuba has owned Jose Marti Park in Ybor City.

Unfortunately, we were too late either to visit Cuba without our passports or to tour the cigar-maker's casita attached to the museum, which would have made our $4 entry fee even more of a bargain than it already was. We wandered down 7th Street to see the cigar makers (using leaves imported from Central America) and took ourselves out for ice cream while awaiting our dinner-meetup up a cafe/bar in a nearby neighborhood.

This is the museum's courtyard with Marti's bust in the background. Funny story about the chickens and roosters: nobody's entirely sure where they came from, but they're such a fixture in Ybor City that on Shrove Tuesday, we could have attended a New Orleans-style funeral parade/bar crawl. (We passed.)