The Lectores Who Read to the Cigar Workers

On Ybor City factory floors, a lector sat on a raised platform and read aloud to cigar rollers for the entire shift. Newspapers in the morning, novels in the afternoon, political essays when the mood was right. The workers' hands were occupied with tobacco, so their entertainment, education, and political consciousness all came from the same voice.

The lectors read Cervantes, Tolstoy, Zola, the daily news from Havana and New York. Labor union pamphlets. Anarchist tracts. Whatever the workers voted to hear — because the lector was elected by workers and paid by their contributions, not by factory owners. That detail made the position powerful and threatening. Owners banned them in the 1930s, replacing them with radios. Workers went on strike to get them back, because a human voice reading a novel was not the same as a radio playing a commercial.

The Ybor City Museum at 1818 East 9th Avenue has the lector's chair, workbenches, molds and cutters. The J.C. Newman Cigar Company on 16th — the last factory — still has a rolling room. The lectores are gone but the craft remains, and watching a roller produce fifty cigars an hour by hand is its own kind of reading.