In the early days of Tampa, you could stand on the banks of the Hillsborough River and if the wind was blowing just right, you might smell the thick aroma of cedar permeating the air.  As cigar factories from Palmetto Beach to West Tampa hummed with workers, a number of ancillary businesses sprouted to support the booming industry. Restaurants and boarding houses kept workers fed and housed. While other businesses manufactured equipment and tools necessary to produce quality hand-rolled cigars.

Cities often grow because they have a fine harbor, an excellent climate, and a railroad junction. For these reasons the City of Tampa grew, and became the largest Gulf port in the state of Florida. But West Tampa, just across the Hillsborough River from Tampa, grew, not of the geographical or climatic possibilities, but because one “Tampan” (Hugh C. Macfarlane) saw an opportunity, and grasped it.

With the closing of Hav-A-Tampa Cigar Company, another chapter in our city's cigar history comes to a close. J.C. Newman, makers of Cuesta-Rey Cigars among other brands, becomes the last remaining Tampa cigar company to produce cigars here.

Tampa's Honorable Judge E. J. Salcines drove Cigar City Magazine into the historic community of West Tampa for a personal tour. We were privileged to embark on a remarkable journey, simultaneously both backward in time and forward in vision.

On September 3, 1921, one of the most daring holdups was attempted in broad daylight here in our city! Three armed bandits stopped a car-carrying payroll for a local cigar factory! Luther M. Davis, head bookkeeper and office manager of the E. Regensburg & Sons Cigar Factory in Ybor City, Laureano Torres, manager of both the Ybor and West Tampa Regensburg factories, G. L. Brightwell and Jack Hayes, their Negro chauffeur, were in the company car. They had just drawn $20,900 from the Exchange National Bank and were traveling on Howard Avenue near Benjamin Park, the aviation landing field.

Google “Cuesta Rey” and you get 58 pages of websites in many languages–mostly cigar stores that sell the brand. Sometimes they are listed as “Cuban Cigars”  and sometimes listed under “Pre-Embargo Cigars”. The cigars are made in the República Dominicana by Arturo Fuente and distributed by the J.C. Newman Company.

Alexander Trainor was born in 1895 in Plattsburgh, N.Y., and grew up in Schenectady. In 1911 his father helped him get his first job at General Electric Company as an office boy. It was here that he was first introduced to socialist politics and, soon after, to the Communist Party. In 1932 he attended the Lenin School in Russia.  He returned to New York later that year, only to move to Jacksonville to begin functioning as the state’s Communist Party organizer. In 1936 he was elected by the Communist Party (the party was established in 1928 in Tampa) to be the party’s state secretary.

In the early 1940s, Justo Fulgueira was working as a cigar maker in an Ybor City factory when a shortage of cigar molds inspired him to design a very special machine. He would eventually become a “master mold maker” and his reputation would be known worldwide.

“Lost City” is about an area of Tampa called Roberts City that was flattened by the bulldozers of Urban Renewal. This close knit community was obliterated in the early 1960s for the sake of “progress”! George Lopez is one resident who continues to keep the memories of his neighborhood alive by making sure the rest of us never forget.

A subject many Americans still do not like to talk about–child labor. “The Exposure of Ignorance” will introduce you to Lewis W. Hine, a well known photographer who traveled across America in the early 1900s to expose child labor. One man with one camera who helped to forever change the illegal child labor practices that existed. Unfortunately, Tampa did not escape the lens of his camera as he gained access to some of our cigar factories in early 1909.