University of South Florida, Tampa Library, Special Collections Department
Workers prepare re-humidified leaves.
and prepared it for the stripping process. Casers, or mojadores, emptied the bales into large bins or troughs and sprayed them with water to restore the leaves’ pliability. Company records were also sometimes kept in the basement. The V.M. Ybor factory, still standing at 14th Street and 9th Avenue, kept the casing department in the basement with a tunnel leading to an additional “stemmery” building where stripping or removal of the tobacco stems took place. “Hundreds of girls [were] busily engaged” in the stripping department of the Ybor factory. In general, stripping, which required delicate handling of the tobacco leaves and nimble fingers, was a job held almost exclusively by women. These Espilladoras carefully removed the stems of the tobacco leaf, careful not to rip or tear them. After wrapper leaves were re-humidified and stripped, they went to Selectors, men who graded the leaves according to color and texture. Because the wrapper leaves would eventually define a cigar’s finished appearance, selecting was an important step in production. Distinctions were made between filler and wrapper leaves. Wrapper leaves are usually “shade grown” under cheesecloth or a latticed covering to protect it from direct sunlight. After the curing and drying stage on the vega, wrapper leaves or Corojo leaves are separated from the filler and binder or Criollo leaves, and packed separately for export. During these years, wrapper leaves were assessed a higher duty than filler leaves. Due to the high cost of importing wrapper leaf, some factories instead used a domestic wrapper grown in Connecticut from Cuban 30
CIGAR CITY MAGAZINE
seed known as “Connecticut Broadleaf”. Still others used wrappers imported from Sumatra and to a lesser-extent Puerto Rico or the Philippines. The entire second floor of most large factories was designated as the workroom or galaria. Here, room for hundreds of workers was available. It was in the galaria that the rollers sat at their tables, working silently while listening to “el lector,” the reader, read news and literature from an elevated platform. The third floor was usually used for blending. A meticulous task requiring experience and knowledge of different types of tobacco, the blending department was responsible for giving different tastes, flavors and aromas to the cigars. The blending of tobacco in Tampa factories was done entirely by hand, usually in large piles or troughs, and stored in wooden barrels for further fermentation. In some factories this arrangement was reversed, with the blending department on the second floor and the rolling on the third. Once the bales were received, re-humidified, sorted and selected, and the filler leaves blended, the rolling process could finally begin. There are two basic parts of a cigar: the body or bunch, and the outer covering or wrapper leaf. The bunch forms the core of the cigar and contains several types of filler tobacco. As mentioned earlier, each blend was specific to the factory that developed it. A proper or distinct blend could take months or years to develop and was a secret “as closely guarded as the recipe for Coke.”