Word: cigar
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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...
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...
Then it came -- the shriek of a siren so loud it silenced even the crowd's mocking roar. Arthur reacted like so many others: he turned into a rock. His eyes glazed, his mouth opened, his hand gripping the microphone like a cigar- store Indian, the young man needed a jolt to make his feet carry him to safety. In the wings, Cooper shrugged. Since his siren had not worked, he had no choice but to send in the clown...