Word: cigar
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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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...
...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...
...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...