Vicente Martinez Ybor
Spanish-born manufacturer who moved his cigar business from Havana to Key West and then founded Ybor City in Tampa in 1885; died in 1896.
Born in Valencia on 7 September 1818, Martinez Ybor moved to Cuba at fourteen and established a Havana cigar factory in 1856, producing El Principe de Gales at a reported rate of twenty thousand cigars a day. When the Ten Years' War began in 1868 he came under Spanish suspicion of aiding the rebels and fled to Key West in 1869, reopening there with Cuban workers who had been displaced by the same conflict.
Labour unrest and the limits of an island town pushed him to look for a mainland site. In October 1885 he bought forty acres near Tampa and laid out a company town, Ybor City, which took shape the following spring; his brick factory, completed at the end of 1886, was described at the time as the largest cigar manufacturing facility in the world.
Ybor City drew thousands of Cuban, Spanish and Italian workers and made Tampa the centre of American cigar manufacturing for half a century. Martinez Ybor died there on 14 December 1896, and much of the town closed for his funeral. The town's factories became the financial base of the Cuban independence movement, and their lectores made the rolling floor an unusually politicised workplace for several decades.