FEELING THE BURN
After 120 years, is Tampa’s ‘Cigar City’ identity about to get snuffed out?
The last standing cigar factory here, in what was once dubbed “Cigar City,” has survived two world wars, the Great Depression, smoking bans and a Cuban trade embargo that wiped out much of its tobacco supply.
Its fortunes have long been linked to Cuba, the communist nation that for decades supplied the region’s tobacco and continues to mint many of its workers. For years cigar executives here say they have looked to Cuba with equal parts intrigue and trepidation, a sentiment that has become more pronounced in recent years as the United States began to mend decades of strained relations with the island nation.
The death of Fidel Castro — the most iconic of cigar smokers — marks yet another milestone for the region. Many here wonder whether the once-booming cigar industry may be on its way out as well.
Among those most worried: Eric Newman, whose family has been making 31 brands of cigars for three generations. For 121 years, the J.C. Newman Cigar Co. has churned out millions of cigars and shipped them worldwide — even as, one by one, 149 surrounding factories shuttered their doors, many moving their operations overseas. But now Newman, who owns the company with his brother, Bobby, says cigar manufacturers and retailers in this stretch of town known as Ybor City face hurdles that could deal a final blow to an industry that has, until now, gone largely unregulated.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration this year introduced new guidelines that will require cigar manufacturers to get approval for new products, pay increased fees and add prominent warning labels.
J.C. Newman’s future may be up in the air, but inside the company’s brick factory, operations are as they’ve always been: Tobacco from countries such as Ecuador, Nicaragua and the Dominican Republic is dried and blended on the top level, then funnelled down a chute onto the factory floor, where more than 100 workers — most of them women — fill, bind and wrap cigars using machines that date from the 1930s.
Winnie Money, 83, has been working at this plant since 1972. Juanita Green, 56, since 1988. Peaches Pickrell, 69, took a job here 37 years ago after her previous employer, a nearby emblem factory, shut down. “It was here or the shrimp factory,” she said, and so here she was, putting newly rolled cigars into plastic packaging. Yesterday she bundled 6,700 cigars into 335 packages. The day before, 7,300.
Ana Rodriguez, who affixes bar code stickers onto individual cigars, has been here 15 years.
“I say all the time, where are we going to find a job where they pay us like this?” said Rodriguez, 59, who emigrated from Cuba in 1970. “We’re all older people. If this place closes, who’s going to give us jobs? Nobody.”
In an election year where much of the rhetoric had focused on bringing back manufacturing jobs, Newman says he can’t understand why the government would want to increase burdens on an operation like his. He says having to lay off workers or, worse, move the factory to Nicaragua, where the company already has a sprawling plant and 650 employees, would have discernible consequences for the community.
“Cigars are the heart and soul of Tampa,” he said. “We’re here. We’re employing more than 100 people. Just don’t close us down.”