Vicente Martinez-Ybor: The Exile Who Built Tampa’s Cigar Empire

In 1885, a 67-year-old cigar manufacturer stood on 40 acres of swampy scrubland northeast of Tampa and saw a city. Within a year, Vicente Martinez-Ybor would build the largest cigar factory in the world on that spot. Within a decade, Tampa would become the Cigar Capital of the World.

From Valencia to Havana to Key West

Born in Valencia, Spain in 1818, Martinez-Ybor fled to Cuba at 14 to dodge mandatory military service. He started as a grocery clerk, learned the cigar trade, and by 1856 had founded his own company in Havana. His El Principe de Gales (“Prince of Wales”) brand was soon turning out 20,000 cigars a day.

Then politics intervened. When Cuba’s Ten Years’ War erupted in 1868, Martinez-Ybor quietly funneled money to the rebels. Spanish loyalists ransacked his home. He escaped to Key West in 1869, anglicized the spelling of his surname from Ibor to Ybor, and rebuilt his business using Cuban tobacco rolled on American soil to dodge import tariffs.

Forty Acres and a Vision

Key West had its own problems: labor strikes, isolation, and a devastating fire in 1886 that leveled much of the town. On the advice of engineer Gavino Gutierrez, Ybor visited Tampa in September 1885. He found cheap land, Henry Plant’s new railroad, and the hot, humid air that kept cut tobacco workable. A $5,000 sweetener from Tampa’s Board of Trade sealed the deal.

Ybor didn’t just build a factory. He built a city. His brick manufacturing complex filled an entire city block. Then came the casitas: small shotgun houses his workers could buy at cost through payroll deductions. He opened a brewery, a hotel, an ice factory, a gas company, and Tampa’s first streetcar line. Unlike most company towns, Ybor wanted his workers to be homeowners, not tenants.

The Cigar Capital of the World

By 1900, Ybor City had more than 230 cigar factories and over 12,000 tabaqueros at work. At the peak in 1929, Tampa was rolling roughly half a billion cigars a year. Tampa transformed from a sleepy village into one of the largest cities in Florida. When Ybor died in 1896 at age 78, his funeral procession stretched nearly two miles through the streets he had built from nothing.

Today, Ybor City is a National Historic Landmark District. Its main street, 7th Avenue, was named one of the “10 Great Streets in America” by the American Planning Association. You can still visit Ybor’s original factory building, now the Centro Ybor complex, and find his statue and bust along the Tampa Riverwalk.