In Florida: Soft Whiffs of Memory

• Share

Carmela Cammarata's stained brown fingers have a life of their own. Nimbly stretching Honduran corojo tobacco leaves with moistened fingertips, she strips the stems with a flat, semicircular blade. Then she expertly rolls the golden leaves around bunched-up filler into fragrant cylinders that could make a cigar lover cry. Rolling cigars comes as naturally and rhythmically to her as drumming fingers on a kitchen table. "I shouldn't be working anymore," says Cammarata, who has been making cigars for 65 of her 80 years. "But I love to make cigars. In my day it was tobacco, tobacco, tobacco. There wasn't anything else."

Cammarata is one of only a few handrollers left from Ybor City, a Tampa neighborhood that boasted some 300 cigar factories and 30,000 workers during its heyday in the 1920s. The handrollers, who now make their specialties only for tourists or connoisseurs, are descendants of Cuban cigar makers who came to the city in the 1880s after a fire destroyed their operations in Key West. Spaniards and Italians joined the 400 million-cigars-a-year business, forging a unique tricultural environment that persists to this day.

At Joe Faedo's bakery in West Tampa, a gaggle of old-timers, organized as the West Tampa Political Group, meet every morning at 8:30, as they have for nearly 60 years, to discuss local politics and catch up on the gossip. Many of the group's members worked as cigar makers in their youth, then moved on to other jobs as the industry declined. Retired plumbers, electricians, dentists, tailors, lawyers, teachers and bakers now fill the group's ranks.

Over the years, the group has endorsed umpteen political candidates, taking them around to meet factory workers as well as the movers and shakers in the Latin community. Led by an 80-year-old former cigar maker named Virgilio Fabian, the men are virulently Democratic, a sharp contrast to the largely conservative Cubans only a couple of hundred miles away in Miami. Earlier this spring the group rallied around the presidential candidacy of Albert Gore. Since Gore dropped out of the race, the new favorite is Michael Dukakis.

On a recent morning the West Tampa Political Group's steering committee -- some 30 men, many in their 70s and 80s -- chatted excitedly with three local politicians who stopped by for a little backslapping. "Everyone knows what he is supposed to do," Fabian told his attentive troops as he introduced them to an aspiring tax accessory. "We have to fight hard for this man and make sure no one loses his home because of high taxes."

The men sipped their cafe con leche and bit hungrily into freshly baked Cuban bread spread thick with butter. Wax-lined baskets of bollitos, deep- fried balls of ground black-eyed peas, were passed around. "Eat, eat. No ^ diets allowed here," they coaxed one another in Spanish. Still, their well- spoken English is an accented blend of Southern drawl and Latin staccato.