Vicente Martinez Ybor - Florida

Florida

In 1868, the Ten Years' War broke out as Cubans fought to win their independence from Spanish colonial rule. Even though he was a Spaniard, Martinez Ybor sympathized with the Cuban cause and was accused (correctly) with providing funds to Cuban rebels. He was threatened with arrest and slipped out of Cuba to Key West, Florida in 1869.

Martinez Ybor quickly built a new factory to continue manufacturing his Principe de Gales brand, employing many Cubans who had also left their homeland due to the war. Though his business prospered, conflict between Spanish and Cuban workers, labor unrest, and the difficulty of transportation to and from the island city eventually led Ybor to search for another site.

With the enticement of a subsidy from Tampa's Board of Trade, Martinez Ybor purchased 40 acres (160,000 m2) of scrubland northeast of Tampa, Florida in October 1885. By the following spring, Martinez Ybor, along with business partners Eduardo Manrara and Ignacio Haya and planner Gavino Gutierrez, had built a company town dubbed Ybor City. His cigar factory, an imposing brick complex that filled a city block, was the largest in the world at the time.

Martinez Ybor sought to avoid the constant labor unrest he had struggled with in Key West by providing what he considered good wages and living conditions. His company built small houses that his workers could purchase for cost, hoping that home ownership would keep his employees from migrating back and forth to Cuba, as was common practice among cigar workers in those days. Martinez Ybor encouraged other cigar factories to move in to increase the pool of workers, and welcomed entrepreneurs who founded businesses in the area. He also ran a variety of other businesses catering to the growing community, including a brewery, a hotel, an ice factory, and a brick factory, among many others.

Martinez Ybor's plan worked. After a slow start, both his business and Ybor City as a whole flourished, with the area's cigar factories hand-rolling and shipping tens of millions of cigars annually by the late 1880s, the number increasing into the hundreds of millions by the turn of the 20th century. The initially independent town was annexed by the city of Tampa in 1887 and continued to grow and prosper for several decades.