Why I wrote this guide to Ybor City is a journey of its own. In my work, I came to the Tampa area many times for conferences over a 25 year period before moving back to my native state in 2016. In staying at one of the many hotels along Channelside the lure to explore Ybor City always accompanied my visits. There was a unique story here of how more than seven different cultural and ethnic groups came together to make up the cigar economy. Of course many were Hispanic but even that group was composed of three separate cultures: the Spanish, the Hispanic Cubans, and the Afro-Cubans. How they all came to settle in Ybor City in its first 25 years is a unique story of American history that transcends the divisions that threaten to characterize our society today.
Despite religious, racial, linguistic, ethnic, and class differences they managed to pull together for the benefit of all. Just about every mutual assistance center for these groups burned down over the years, but the remaining community centers offered their social and healthcare services to the ones that had been displaced. The people of Ybor City were pulled together into one community out of adversity which included the oppression of Spain on those born in Cuba, the intolerable and unsustainable conditions back home in Italy, the religious persecution of eastern Europe, and the hostility of the new Tampa environment which included the unbearable heat, mosquitos, malaria, snakes, and alligators. The cigar industry was assaulted at every stage of production from the tariffs and taxes imposed by both Spain and the United States on tobacco and the finished cigar product. But it came to be a success born out of both its adversity and its diversity. It is this theme that drove the creation of our country from the very beginning. Can we as a people reclaim the spirit of living and working together as exemplified by the Ybor City community 135 years ago? It is a cultural heritage of monumental proportions and it is best illustrated by the day of Don Vicente Martinez-Ybor’s burial 125 years ago in 1896.
From the short biography of Mr. Ybor in the guide is this concluding section:
A Final Pilgrimage
On December 14, 1896, Vicente Ybor died at his home in Tampa following surgery from a liver ailment just a few weeks prior. The town of Tampa was approaching 15,000 inhabitants at the time of his death. The headline in the Tampa Tribune the following day read, “GREAT BENEFACTOR GONE.”
On the day of Ybor’s funeral, the town was closed during his service. The procession from his home was over a mile long to the Oaklawn Cemetery. The newspaper recorded the nearly one hundred carriages conveying the leading personalities and dignitaries of the day and lists many by name. It only briefly referred to the large crowd of pedestrians who followed from the rear. The pedestrians gathered in large measure by their communities. There were groups of Spaniards. Near them were Hispanic and Afro-Cubans, followed by Italians, Romanians, and others of eastern European descent including Jews, as well as Germans and immigrants of other nations. They had each made their pilgrimage to America. Now they were making the 1.5-mile walk to bury the man largely responsible for their being where they were.
Each group had a niche in the cigar economy, had their own social and mutual assistance centers, and spoke different languages, but they lived and worked together in the same community. On that December day, they came together as one people out of mutual respect to pay homage to the man who had made it all possible for them to escape an intolerable past life for the possibility of a new one: Don Vicente Martínez-Ybor, a refugee and immigrant himself. The phenomenon of his Latin community is the story of an America formed on the foundation of immigration, exemplifying the nation’s immigrant story for the ages.
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