Jose Marti
Cuban writer and independence leader whose revolutionary movement was financed largely by cigar workers in Key West and Ybor City; killed in 1895.
Marti was born in Havana on 28 January 1853 and spent much of his adult life in exile, writing and organising for Cuban independence. His political base in the United States was not among the wealthy but in the cigar factories of Key West and Tampa, where thousands of Cuban rollers contributed a portion of their wages to the cause week after week, an arrangement that funded the movement more reliably than any single patron.
The factories were also its communication network. Lectores read newspapers, novels and political material aloud to workers from raised platforms, a practice that made the rolling floor an unusually literate and politically informed workplace and that gave Marti a direct channel to his supporters. He announced the Cuban Revolutionary Party in Florida in 1892. Reading aloud on the rolling floor originated in Cuba and travelled with the workers.
He was killed at Dos Rios on 19 May 1895, early in the war he had organised. The link between Cuban cigar labour and Cuban independence remains one of the clearest cases anywhere of an industry's workforce financing a political movement. A Havana cigar factory carries his name, and his image runs through the Cuban industry's institutional vocabulary, from factory titles to commemorative releases.