
Sign up to save your podcasts
Or


Narrated by Andy Garcia. At the turn of the century until the 1930s in the cigar factories of Tampa and Ybor City, a well dressed man in a panama hat with a loud and beautiful voice sat atop a platform and read to the cigar workers as they rolled. These readers, known as Lectores de Tabaqueres, read Cervantes, Zola, Victor Hugo, Karl Marx, Jules Verne…. It was the voices and words of these lectores – before radio and mechanization, who informed, organized, and incited the cigar workers, who labored by hand until the 1930s, when both the rollers and readers were replaced by mechanization. A lost tradition of story and smoke.
By The Kitchen Sisters & Radiotopia4.5
12661,266 ratings
Narrated by Andy Garcia. At the turn of the century until the 1930s in the cigar factories of Tampa and Ybor City, a well dressed man in a panama hat with a loud and beautiful voice sat atop a platform and read to the cigar workers as they rolled. These readers, known as Lectores de Tabaqueres, read Cervantes, Zola, Victor Hugo, Karl Marx, Jules Verne…. It was the voices and words of these lectores – before radio and mechanization, who informed, organized, and incited the cigar workers, who labored by hand until the 1930s, when both the rollers and readers were replaced by mechanization. A lost tradition of story and smoke.

90,953 Listeners

43,960 Listeners

38,222 Listeners

27,047 Listeners

26,225 Listeners

11,636 Listeners

3,029 Listeners

2,884 Listeners

6,894 Listeners

1,269 Listeners

3,651 Listeners

10,423 Listeners

17,637 Listeners

2,237 Listeners

2,135 Listeners

5,214 Listeners

3,560 Listeners

1,116 Listeners

4,838 Listeners

5,764 Listeners

145 Listeners

271 Listeners

445 Listeners

117 Listeners

569 Listeners

71 Listeners

13 Listeners

36 Listeners

0 Listeners

0 Listeners

47 Listeners

98 Listeners

1 Listeners