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.
Before refrigeration, cold itself was a harvested crop — cut from frozen lakes and rivers in the dead of winter by armies of men, horses, and saws. The natural-ice industry was effectively invented by Frederic Tudor of Boston, the self-styled “Ice King,” who began shipping New England pond ice to warm climates in 1806 and built a global trade that would eventually carry blocks of frozen American water to the Caribbean, Europe, and even India. By the late nineteenth century, harvesting and selling that ice employed an estimated 90,000 people in the United States alone.
The work was brutal, seasonal, and oddly precise. When the ice on a lake or river grew thick enough — at least 18 inches for safe harvest — crews marked it into a grid and used a horse-drawn ice plow, invented by Nathaniel Wyeth in 1825, to score deep parallel grooves. Men then sawed the scored ice into uniform blocks, floated them through channels of open water to the shore, and hauled them up ramps into vast icehouses packed with sawdust, which insulated the blocks well enough to keep them frozen through summer and across long sea voyages.
The Hudson River became the industry’s spine: by the 1880s it carried around 135 major ice warehouses and employed roughly 20,000 workers. Maine’s Kennebec River, Massachusetts lakes like Wenham and Fresh Pond, and countless smaller waters fed a trade that put cold drinks, fresh fish, and preserved food within reach of ordinary people for the first time.
Then the cold was manufactured. Artificial refrigeration and plant-made ice, spreading from the late nineteenth century, freed ice production from winter and from geography; by 1914 plant ice already outproduced the natural harvest. The domestic electric refrigerator of the 1920s and 1930s finished the job at the household level, and growing pollution of the natural ice supply destroyed public confidence in it. The ice cutter’s frozen harvest melted into history.