Ybor City

Ybor City owes its existence to its founder and namesake, Vincente Martinez-Ybor, a Spainiard who immigrated to Cuba in 1832, at the age of 14.

Ybor (pronouced "ee-bore") worked first as a clerk in a grocery store, then improved his economic status by becoming a cigar salesman. In 1853, when he was 35, Ybor started his own cigar factory in Havana.

But the ever increasing tariff the United States imposed on imported cigars, coupled with unrest among Cuban cigar factory workers and the start of the Cuban revolution against Spain, caused Ybor in 1868 to move his cigar factory and his employees to Key West, Florida.

Although successful, the growth of Ybor's business was thwarted by continued labor unrest, the lack of adequate fresh water at Key West, and by the island's isolation from Ybor's customers.

In 1884, the 66-year-old Ybor met and befriended Gavino Gutierrez, a fellow Spaniard who had come to New York City in 1868 and visited Key West frequently in search of exotic fruits such as guavas. On one such visit to Key West, Gutierrez along with fellow New Yorker and cigar factory owner Ignacio Haya, convinced Ybor to investigate the rapidly growing port city of Tampa as a site for his factory.

Ybor liked Tampa's potential. Earlier in 1884, a Connecticut businessman, Henry Bradley Plant, had completed a railroad line from the east coast of Florida to his new Tampa port facilities. Ybor saw that the new port would make possible easy importation of Cuban tobacco, while the railroad's connection to East Coast ports and railroads would provide ecconomical transportation of finished cigars to the populous cities of the northeast.