“The last time I saw Fidel Castro was November 2005 and it was also my last,” said Al Fox stoically, taking a break from his story so he could take a sip of his wine at Ybor City’s Columbia Restaurant and pick a piece of lint off his white guayabera.

Beginning in 1886, immigrants from Spain, Italy, and Cuba fled poverty and warfare to seek new lives in Tampa. The tumultuous cigar industry provided some shocks of its own. Violence, strikes and work stoppages in the cigar factories reminded all how tough things could be on a regular basis. An erratic cycle of feast and famine continued in Ybor City for fifty years. The Cuban sandwich rose in popularity during the 1920s, when electric sandwich presses and toasters became more common. During the Great Depression, the filling sandwiches served as a Latin-flavored equivalent of New Orleans' "Po' Boy."

In April 1980, the flood of Cuban refugees continued for several weeks from the port of Mariel. Cubans fled in a desperate flotilla, and Fidel Castro let them go. Family members in the United States suddenly saw hope for relatives still living under the Communist yoke. A desperate boatlift ensued, often undertaken by shrimp trawlers and fishing boats of questionable seaworthiness.

Many long time Tampa residents will remember the myriad minor and semi-pro teams who regularly traveled to the island for exhibition and winter leaugue games. Cesar Brioso, gives us the Tampa-Cuba chain with his story about baseball in Cuba.

In July 2010, Paul Guzzo and his father travelled to Cuba with Raul Villamia and his family. The purpose of the trip was to document Raul's return to Cuba after more than three decades away. Guzzo is currently working with Raul Villamia on his memoirs, including his time as a member of Tampa's branch of the 26th of July Movement, Fidel Castro's revolutionary army. The trip also provided Guzzo a firsthand look at how the embargo affects Cuba and how the Cuban people view the United States. A regular contributor and our senior writer, he shared some of his experiences with Cigar City Magazine.

Did the Hillsborough County Sheriffs Office Make a Deal With Castro  to Bring Down the Mob?

Author Scott Deitche takes us to the casino tables of Havana in the 1940s and 1950s with an excerpt from his book, The Silent Don. Dietche carefully unravels Tampa's organized crime network, showing us threads that reached from Havana to New York to Dallas and beyond.

Carlos was a founding member of Tampa’s “26th of July Movement”, Castro’s revolutionary army. The Tampa branch supported Castro throughout the Cuban Revolution and in the months following the victory, sending Castro money, food, clothing, and medical and military supplies. Some of the Batista supporters who fled Cuba following his ousting moved to Tampa and made it their mission to harass those who helped Castro, which included Carlos. The police did not protect Carlos, nor did the government. The only place he believed he would be safe was in Cuba…or so he thought.

"Do you remember," I shouted to be heard by the mourning workers. "November 27, 1891?" A resounding "Si!" filled the air. "Martí came to Ybor to visit the factory workers on the train that Mr. Plant had recently built to Tampa. The speech he delivered, Los Pinos Nuevos, was inspired by a vision he saw from the train."

Since the town of Sancti Spiritus, Cuba is by the Yayabo River, some say the shirt was originally called the yayabera. Others say it was named for the tart fruit, the guava. Workers frequently wore the shirts as they ate their lunch in the shade of the guava trees. It even became the uniform of the resistance fighters in Cuba's struggle for independence from Spain. When people started moving to Florida from Cuba in the late 1880s, they brought the shirts with them.