Question: Which Tampa neighborhood gave the city its Cuban coffee tradition?
Answer: Ybor City.
Vicente Martinez Ybor was a Spanish cigar maker who ran his business out of Havana, then Key West, before labor trouble and cramped quarters sent him looking for a third home. In October 1885, with a subsidy brokered by Tampa’s Board of Trade, he bought 40 acres of scrubland northeast of what was then a village of fewer than 1,000 people. He built hundreds of small houses and sold them to his workers at cost, hoping they’d put down roots instead of drifting back to Cuba.
It worked. Cuban, Spanish, and Italian immigrants filled the town, Tampa annexed it in 1887, and by 1900 Ybor City was the cigar capital of the world—the reason Tampa still goes by Cigar City. The workers brought their coffee with them, and the cafecito and cortadito you can order on Seventh Avenue today came north from Havana in the same wave that brought the cigars.
