https://www.cnn.com/2023/10/29/us/two-killed-18-injured-florida-shooting/index.html

I remember growing up in Ybor City. It was the Cuban “downtown” of Tampa, all the shops and businesses and theaters were there, and many of the cigar factories, as well as the great social clubs that brought culture, community and medical care to the cigar workers. The cigar factories were all closed now, and the cigar culture was gone, finished by the cigar-making machines and the great strikes of the 1930s. The cigar culture was dying out, but enough of the old-timers remained that the neighborhood still had a foot back in the old era. The architecture was reminiscent of old New Orleans (it had been built around the same time) with shops and stores on the ground floor and apartments on the second. On the balconies folks would come out and gossip with the folks strolling down Seventh Avenue. We went every weekend, to see a movie, or visit “Los Helados de Ybor” an ice cream shop specializing in tropical fruit sherbets, the flavors of the Caribbean, Mamey, Fruta Bomba, Maranyon, Zapote, the only place in North America where you could taste them. The smell of coffee brewing and cigar smoke filled the air and the Havana working class dialect was heard everywhere, occasionally drowned out by the rattle of dominoes as they were shuffled after a hand.

It was the last hurrah. By the time I was in college, most of the Cubans had left, and Ybor City became an artist’s colony, its old buildings and warehouses converted into lofts and housing for hippies and bohemians. I spent a lot of time there too. It was different than when I was a kid, but in many ways the same. Eventually if became a tourist trap, a Disneyfied theme park, lots of shops and stores, restaurants and bars catering to the tourist trade, all giving a nod to the old Cuban Cigar past. Museum Cubans.

Since then the old ‘hood has morphed again, first drugs and junkies, then Central American immigrants, then hard drinking and ‘party’, used as a verb.

I hate succumbing to nostalgia, but I wish you could have seen it.

https://www.wwfm.org/arts-and-culture-news/2005-05-14/cigar-stories