Key West is closer to Havana than to Miami, and for sixty years that geography was an industry. William H. Wall opened the island's first cigar factory in 1831 with about fifty rollers and Havana leaf. The trade only became a city-shaping force after 1868, when the Ten Years War pushed Cuban manufacturers and their workforces off the island. Samuel Seidenberg was making cigars here from 1867; Vicente Martinez Ybor moved El Principe de Gales from Havana in 1869. American tariffs made finished Cuban cigars expensive and Cuban leaf comparatively cheap, and Key West sat in the gap.
The peak was extraordinary for a town on a coral island. By 1885 there were eighty-six factories, twenty of them employing more than a hundred people, and Eduardo Hidalgo Gato's works alone had five hundred. Counts for 1890 vary by source, from roughly eighty factories to as many as two hundred, but production is more consistently put at around one hundred million hand-rolled cigars a year, and the population had passed 18,000 with a Cuban majority. A skilled roller could make three hundred cigars in a day. Production topped one hundred million again in 1911, but by then the industry's centre of gravity had already moved to Tampa.
What survived longest was the politics. The San Carlos Institute, founded in 1871 by the exile editor Jose Dolores Poyo and Juan Maria Reyes, was a school, a club and a revolutionary headquarters, and one of the earliest integrated schools in the United States. Jose Marti addressed a mass meeting there on 3 January 1892 and called it La Casa Cuba; the Cuban Revolutionary Party took shape out of that week. The money came from cigar benches. Marti's organisation drew reported sums of twenty to thirty thousand dollars a month from Florida workers who earned it three hundred cigars at a time.
1831
William H. Wall opens the island's first cigar factory with about fifty rollers and imported Havana leaf.
1867
Samuel Seidenberg begins manufacturing in Key West, producing La Rosa Espanola.
1868
The Ten Years War begins in Cuba and exiles arrive in numbers, transforming the town's economy.
1869
Vicente Martinez Ybor moves El Principe de Gales from Havana to Key West after Spanish authorities accuse him of aiding the rebels.
1871
Cuban exiles found the San Carlos Institute as a school and patriotic club.
1885
Eighty-six factories operate on the island; twenty employ more than a hundred workers each and E. H. Gato's employs 500.
1886
Fire destroys at least ten factories and a bonded tobacco warehouse; thousands of workers leave for the new town of Ybor City.
1890
Factory counts vary widely by source, from roughly 80 to 200; output is more consistently put at about 100 million cigars. The population passes 18,000, mostly Cuban.
1892
Marti speaks at the San Carlos Institute on 3 January, uniting the exile factions behind a single revolutionary party.
1900
Only 44 factories remain as manufacture concentrates in Tampa.
1911
Output tops 100 million cigars again, the last year at that scale.
1916
Eduardo Hidalgo Gato builds a concrete factory at Simonton and Virginia to replace a wooden works lost to fire.
1918
Workers strike over conditions, demanding among other things no sweeping before 6 a.m. and ice in the drinking water.
2001
Monroe County completes restoration of the Gato building, bought in 1998, for county offices and a small cigar museum.
Key West grew nothing. Every leaf came by boat from Cuba, unloaded at the wharves and stored in bonded warehouses within a few blocks of the factories, which is why the 1886 fire that took a tobacco warehouse was so damaging. The product was the clear Havana: Cuban filler, binder and wrapper rolled by Cuban hands on American soil, sold at a price no Havana-made cigar could match once the tariff was applied. The model's weakness was that it depended entirely on shipping, and the island's freight connections and labour costs eventually lost out to Tampa's railroad.
William H. Wall
American merchant who established the first Key West cigar factory in 1831, employing around fifty workers on imported Havana leaf.
Samuel Seidenberg
Generally credited as the first of the Cuban-era manufacturers, making cigars on the island from 1867 under the La Rosa Espanola name.
Vicente Martinez Ybor
Brought El Principe de Gales from Havana in 1869 and then took the trade north in 1885, gutting the island's industry.
Eduardo Hidalgo Gato
The island's dominant manufacturer, employing 500 by 1885 and building the worker housing district known as Gatoville.
Jose Dolores Poyo
Exile editor and co-founder of the San Carlos Institute in 1871, who published the separatist paper El Yara from Key West.
Jose Marti
Raised money and unified the exile factions in Key West, addressing the San Carlos Institute on 3 January 1892.
Mario Sanchez
Key West folk artist whose carved and painted wood reliefs are the most detailed surviving record of cigar-worker street life.
E. H. Gato Cigar Factory
The island's largest, employing 500 by 1885. The surviving neoclassical concrete building at Simonton and Virginia dates from 1916 and was one of the earliest integrated workplaces in the country, with Cuban, Bahamian, African American and white workers on the same floor.
Seidenberg and Co.
Maker of La Rosa Espanola from 1867 and once occupying a full city block of four large buildings. Its arrival marks the start of the island's Cuban-era industry.
El Principe de Gales
Vicente Martinez Ybor's factory, relocated from Havana in 1869. At its Key West height the operation is reported to have made around ten million cigars a year before moving to Tampa.
Havana-American Company
One of the trust-era consolidations that dominated the island in the 1900s and 1910s alongside the Ferdinand Hirsch Company, Ruy Lopez and Geo. W. Nichols.
The island ran on the same bench culture as Havana: a galera, a lector paid by the rollers, and a political argument that never really stopped. Workers organised early and struck often, and their demands were as much about dignity and dust as about pay. The San Carlos Institute doubled as school, theatre and party headquarters, and the neighbourhood of small wooden cottages that Gato built around his factory, Gatoville, housed a workforce that was Cuban, Bahamian and African American in a Florida that legally segregated almost everything else. Hurricanes in 1909 and 1919, fires, and Tampa's incentives took the industry apart, but the Cuban layer of Key West did not leave with it.