Ybor City Beginnings Text/Source for Podcast

One winter night in 1884, Don Vincente Martinez Ybor sat in his Key West residence discussing business with an associate from New York.  Ignacio Haya, like Ybor, was a cigar manufacturer. Workers constantly threatened to strike and disrupt their operations.  Haya had already sent his business partner Serafin Sanchez to look for a new location to build their factories. Ybor was no less determined to move his operations out of Key West and New York, to escape organized labor unions. This would not be the first time he would start over.  For thirty years he had run a successful brokering and manufacturing cigar business in Havana.  His “El Principe de Gales” brand of clear Havanas secured him a successful U.S. market. Then a series of events took place in the 1860s resulting in Ybor leaving Cuba.  First, his wife died, then cigar workers began to strike, and the Spanish raised taxes.  Though an elite Spaniard from Valencia, Ybor changed his political views, and gave his support to the separatists.  When war broke out in 1868, an order for his arrest was issued, and Ybor left quickly for Key West. 

As Ybor and Haya discussed their plans, they did not realize that their search for a new location would be resolved that night with the visit of Ybor’s old friends, Bernardino Gargol and Gavino Gutierrez.  The two men had just come from Tampa, and their positive report so excited the interests of Ybor and Haya, they booked steamship passage, and arrived the next morning.  With the cooperation of the Tampa Board of Trade, they purchased tracts of land on the northeast outskirts of Tampa, and began building the factory town that came to be known as Ybor City.   By March 1886 production had begun with the importation of cigar workers from Key West and Cuba, and by the end of year there were 176 dwellings for the workers.[1] 

---

[1] L. Glenn Westfall, Don Vincente Martinez Ybor, The Man and His Empire.  (New York and London: Garland Publishing, Inc. 1987), 17-79.