The Ybor cigar makers' strike of 1931 took place in Ybor City, Tampa, Florida, starting on November 26 and ended in December. Some strikers were jailed, "Lectors" were banned and there was a lockout. Following legal intervention, some workers returned to work at previous wage levels but others were not re-employed. Lectors had by tradition been elected by the workers and, as well as reading aloud newspaper articles, often from left-wing radical publications, they recited and acted more generally, including from classic works – effectively they provided a form of education for illiterate workers. The most significant effect of the strike in the longer term was that the lector culture was brought to an end.
Summary
The Tampa cigar makers' strike took place in Ybor City, Florida from November to December 1931. It was made up of a highly unionized, militant cigar maker workforce who had a long history of radical labor–management relations dating back to the 1880s when Cuban immigrants first began building the Florida cigar industry.
Due to rising unemployment and falling wages in the wake of the Great Depression, workers of the Tobacco Workers Industrial Union engaged in radical demonstrations, most notably, the celebration of the anniversary of the Russian Revolution. In doing so, 17 workers were jailed. This sparked a preliminary walkout by workers but more importantly prompted factory owners to expel the widely renowned "Lector" in the cigar factories. This "Lector" was a fellow worker who would read aloud newspapers and literature to an illiterate Cuban workforce during production periods to keep workers' minds occupied. The readings were very often pro-union, leftist and anti-corporation.
After the displays of radicalism from the Cuban workers, factory owners accused the Lector of proliferating Communist propaganda and banned him from the workplace. This was a bitter loss for the workers and led to a three-week strike in which vigilante squads, the police and the Ku Klux Klan clashed with affiliates of the Trade Union Unity League of the Communist Party, a branch of the Tobacco Workers Industrial Union. The strike finally ended on December 15, 1931.
The Lector, replaced by a radio, was never returned to the workplace. The significance of the 1931 Tampa Cigar Makers Strike is that despite a highly unionized workforce, and despite a constitutionally backed argument for the right to free speech, it spelled the end of an age-old, artisan privilege for the cigar workers who were falling prey to the new, industrial age setting in on the United States.
Background
During the 1860s, conflict in Cuba between the Spanish colonial government and Cuban nationalists encouraged widespread immigration into the US. In 1867 alone, 100,000 Cubans, mostly made up of highly skilled laborers coming from the cigar industry, immigrated into Florida thus providing the labor necessary to drive the cigar industry.
Vicente Martinez Ybor was one of the first cigar manufacturers to immigrate. With the help of Tampa's Board of Trade, he bought a $9,000 tract of land just outside Tampa's city limit. He named his plot of land Ybor City and quickly built a factory and housing for Cuban and Spanish cigar makers who in 1886 began production of fine, handmade cigars that gave Tampa national recognition. From 1887 to World War II Ybor City was a company town dominated by the cigar industry. By 1910, Tampa was producing one million cigars per day and its 10,000 cigar workers represented over half of the community's entire labor force.
The influx of Cuban, Spanish and Italian workers made Ybor City and the encompassing Tampa region a vibrant, radical and ethnically diverse community interested in politics and ideology. Early in their history, the militant unionism of Cuban workers is evident. After the failed Cuban revolution in 1868, the Cuban Nationalist movement continued to grow in Key West, and, when Cuban independence began to dim in the 1870s, workers turned towards trade unionism with even more vigor. La Resistencia was formed in 1895 as a social group for Tampa cigar workers and transformed into a very powerful trade union. It fostered links between cigar industry workers in Tampa and workers in Havana, Cuba thus becoming an effective force for organizing workers and leading successful strikes in 1899 and 1901. After the strike of 1901, La Resistencia declined in importance and the Cigar Makers International Union replaced it as the chief labor organization in Tampa.
Historian Robert Kerstein writes that early twentieth-century Tampa continued to experience frequent labor conflicts, as tensions grew between cigar manufacturers and the city's immigrant workforce. Efforts to impose tighter production quotas and enforce corporate efficiency standards heightened worker resistance and helped set the stage for later major strikes.
By 1910, the cigar industry's labor force was 41 percent Cuban, 23 percent Spanish and 19 percent Italian. These workers were radical and would form clubs and discussion groups devoted to a wide range of socialist and anarchist causes. Additionally, they supported numerous radical newspapers such as El Internacional and La Voce Dello Shiavo ("The Voice of the Slave") – an evocation of workers' feelings during those times. The Tampa Citizen was a newspaper published by local unions during and after WW II with the central ideology that it is "Published In The Interest Of The Working Class Of Tampa." As such, workers were deeply entrenched in the radical labor movement taking place in the United States.
Historian Susan Greenbaum notes that Afro-Cubans played a significant role in Tampa's labor and political life during the early twentieth century. They formed their own mutual-aid societies and political clubs, which helped support broader organizing efforts in Ybor City. Although Afro-Cubans were active participants, Greenbaum explains that racial divisions in Tampa meant that their contributions were often overlooked, and solidarity across racial groups was limited. This helps explain why many of the protest actions leading up to the 1931 strike were centered within the Spanish-speaking communities but did not fully involve Anglo-American or African American workers.
Historian Gary Mormino writes that Italian immigrants formed an important part of Ybor City's multiethnic workforce during the early twentieth century. Although many Italians arrived later than Cuban and Spanish cigar makers, they gradually integrated into the cigar industry through family networks and on-the-job apprenticeship. Italians also participated actively in the city's radical political culture, joining socialist and anarchist clubs and relying on mutual-aid societies that offered social support to immigrant workers. Mormino notes that despite occasional cultural tensions among the city's ethnic groups, Italian workers frequently aligned themselves with Cuban and Spanish cigar makers during labor disputes, strengthening interethnic solidarity in Ybor City's labor movement.
After 1900, large American corporations such as the American Cigar Company and the Duke Tobacco Trust bought many Tampa cigar factories bringing a corporate attitude that would not be able to peacefully co-exist with worker radicalism and militancy. Corporate culture introduced a drive for greater efficiency via production quotas. New rules, such as requiring a certain number of cigars to be rolled from an exact weight of tobacco distributed to rollers, prompted greater worker resistance and more strikes. Consequently, labor-management relations were characterized by frequent strikes, walkouts, lockouts and incidents of mob violence and vigilantism. In their struggles with manufacturers, cigar workers had more leverage than the average factory worker because they were highly skilled and had an enormous sense of solidarity. For this reason, they were hard to replace and were able to survive strikes by sticking together in the larger Cuban/Spanish communities across Key West and Havana.
Women and Family Roles Although women were not formally employed as cigar strikers in 1931, they played an essential role in sustaining Ybor City's immigrant labor community during periods of economic conflict. Historian Nancy A. Hewitt notes that Cuban, Spanish, and Italian women were central to family survival and community cohesion, often managing household budgets, organizing mutual-aid support, and providing food and childcare that enabled men to participate fully in labor activism.
Many Latin women were also politically informed and participated in discussions about nationalism, labor rights, and social justice through their involvement in ethnic clubs and mutual-aid societies. Their unpaid and often overlooked labor helped maintain community solidarity during strikes and economic downturns, making them a significant part of Tampa's labor history.
The Lector
The best reflection of the sentiments of immigrant cigar workers was the factory "Lector" or "Reader". The workers would each give 25 to 50 cents of their weekly salary to elect a fellow workman to act as a "Lector" in which he would read aloud various materials such as newspapers mentioned above or others such as The Daily Worker and Socialist Call, or works of literature written by authors such as Tolstoy or Dickens.
The readers, elected by their peers, were actually highly theatrical and would not simply read the book but literally act out the scenes in a dramatic fashion upon a podium set up in the middle of the factory. Therefore, many illiterate cigar makers were well-versed in subjects such as politics, labor relations, literature, and international relations. According to Tampa's leading anarchist, Alfonso Coniglio, a cigar maker at the age of 14, "to them [the lectors] we owe particularly our sense of the class struggle". This sense of class struggle drove the workers to resist poor working conditions and to fight for more rights. Strikes by Tampa's cigar workers were rarely focused on issues of wages and hours but instead on being able to control their working conditions. The Lector, in particular, was crucial to the workers' conditions and something that would spark an 8,000-person strike to keep in place.
Timeline
The Great Depression had taken its effect on the industry, creating rising unemployment and falling wage rates. Additionally, demand for luxury cigars fell and manufacturers around the country shifted to increased production of cheap cigars that could be made by machine and sold for as little as five cents each. Despite this, Tampa's cigar makers resisted change by defending wage scales and traditional work practices.
By 1931 they rejected the conservative Cigar Makers' International Union, which was an affiliate of the American Federation of Labor, and 5,000 of them poured into the Tobacco Workers Industrial Union, an affiliate of the Trade Union Unity League of the Communist Party.
Initial conflict By November 1931 the workers were actively engaging in radical demonstrations, most notably the public celebration of the fourteenth anniversary of the Russian Revolution. This provoked public officials and vigilante squads, many times working together, to come down on the radical workers. Vigilante squads were never once arrested, indicted or penalized for taking the law into their own hands to take action against striking cigar makers. Specifically, one party organizer was kidnapped and flogged by unknown assailants.
But what angered the strikers most was that seventeen workers were sent to jail, where they sent this letter to their counterparts:
As a result, cigar workers at several factories went on strike in support of the prisoners. This, among other public disturbances, threatened the owners of the factories and prompted them to accuse the Lectors of reading Communist propaganda.