Cigar-Factory Lector

In the great cigar factories of Havana, Key West, and Tampa, the most powerful voice on the floor did not belong to the owner. It belonged to the lector — the reader who sat on a raised platform, the tribuna, and read aloud all day to hundreds of cigar rollers bent silently over their tables. He was elected by the workers and paid by the workers, a sliver deducted from each roller’s wages, and that single fact made him something almost unheard of in industrial labor: an educator and entertainer answerable to the workforce, not to management.

The practice began in Cuba in 1865, when the journalist and poet Saturnino Martinez launched the working-class paper La Aurora and organized the first readings at the El Figaro factory in Havana. The following year the large Partagas factory adopted it, and the custom spread through hundreds of Havana’s cigar houses before crossing the water to the Cuban exile communities of Key West and, from the mid-1880s, Ybor City in Tampa.

The lector’s day had a shape. Mornings brought the newspapers — local, national, and the labor and political press. Afternoons brought literature, read in installments like a serial: Hugo, Zola, Dumas, Cervantes, and the rest, with the workers themselves voting on the titles. The cigar Montecristo, founded at Havana’s H. Upmann factory in 1935, is said to take its name from The Count of Monte Cristo, a favorite of the rollers who heard it read aloud.

This remarkable institution made cigar factories into something like schools and political clubs, fueling literacy, labor organizing, and anarchist and socialist politics — and that is precisely why it was destroyed. In Tampa, after years of friction, the manufacturers banned the lectores in November 1931, tearing out the platforms; the strike that followed failed, and radio replaced the reader’s voice. The tradition survives only faintly in Cuba today.