The Cigar City. The year is 1898. Young Cuban rebel Salvador Ortiz and his family have escaped the hardship of war-torn Cuba, but the union halls, cigar factories, and dark alleys of Tampa are filled with violence and vendetta. Salvador must defy constant labor strife and deadly corruption in a one-industry town filled with backroom cockfights, street thugs, late-night abductions and mass production of the world’s best hand-rolled stogies. An ideological battle for control of the cigar industry tests Salvador’s self-respect and love of hard work as he fights to abandon his rambunctious, outlaw past and lead his proud Cuban family through a colorful immigrant society. His wish for a peaceful life as a husband, a father, and a man of dignity is threatened by a lawless underworld and a cultural conflict with a dangerous, bloody history.
The Story Behind This Book
The following is a work of fiction and is loosely based on real events. In some places, the actual history may have been altered to suit the story. An additional author’s note at the end of the book will explain these historical discrepancies in further detail and also provide additional sources for reading about Ybor City’s fascinating history.
Praise and Reviews
As author Mark McGinty notes in the acknowledgments of his
second novel, The Cigar Maker owes a stylistic debt to
influences ranging from such literary luminaries as James Ellroy, Mario
Puzo, and William Shakespeare to such epic film trilogies as Star Wars,
Indiana Jones, and Lord of the Rings. Indeed, “epic” is perhaps the best
word to describe this dense and moving novel, for it has both the
multigenerational sweep of works like John Steinbeck’s East of Eden
and the social awareness of John Dos Passos’ USA Trilogy. All
of this is to say that for his sophomore literary outing, McGinty has
done nothing short of producing the great American novel.
Part of what makes The Cigar Maker both “great” and
“American” is that the novel is steeped in the immigrant experience.
Shortly after the sinking of the USS Maine, a young father named Salvador Ortiz moves
his family from Cuba to the United States and goes to work making a
living for himself as a cigar maker. The Florida city in which he finds
himself, moreover, is a hotbed of political and criminal industry, and
it isn’t long before Ortiz — who wants nothing more than to provide for
his wife and children — becomes embroiled in the the town’s
machinations. In this regard, The Cigar Maker also reads like a
literary version of Martin Scorcese’s Gangs of New York with a
Cuban flare. That is, it’s a historical tale of class struggle with a
distinctly humane focus in that the story of the Ortiz family mirrors
not only the story of American workers but the story of America itself.
None of this, of course, is to say that The Cigar Maker
presents an overly rosy picture of the American dream. Ortiz struggles
daily just to get by, and he endures more setbacks than triumphs
throughout the novel. Yet he never gives up, and keeps fighting for the
greater good because, more than anything, he is a man of great
conscience — a rarity, perhaps, in the current postmodern literary
landscape, but a breath of fresh air as well.
Though The Cigar Maker is largely a historical novel, the
issues it touches upon are as relevant today as they were a century ago:
labor relations, immigration, and the nation’s involvement in foreign
wars chief among them. What’s especially striking about The Cigar
Maker, however, is that it doesn’t treat these issues as discrete
phenomena; rather, it explores the interconnectedness of all three. In
so doing, the novel reminds us that although we are all in many ways
beholden to the vast machinery of forces beyond our control, we are all,
nonetheless, creatures of conscience and are all, thus, responsible for
doing what we can to shape the world into the place we want it to be.
Painstakingly researched and lovingly crafted, The Cigar Maker
is a serious and significant novel about the American experience. The
writing is beautiful, the characters lively, and the settings awash with
visceral historical detail. An excellent book on all counts.
-Small Press Reviews
From the mountains of 19th century Cuba, where bandits and revolutionaries fought to overthrow Spanish dominance, to the floor of the cigar factories in Ybor City, Florida, where labor leaders sought to defend Cuban workers from exploitation by Spanish business owners, The Cigar Maker delivers a riveting, little-known chapter in the history of Latino-Americans in the US southeast.
Salvador Ortiz, a young man orphaned by violence in his homeland of Cuba, joins a group of bandits as a “torch and machete” man, terrorizing a Spanish plantation owner by kidnapping his daughter, but grows into a husband, a father, a community leader, and a man of honor and dignity in this novel of labor movements and corruption in turn-of-the-century Florida.
Dianne K. Salerni
Author of We Hear the Dead, Sourcebooks, April 2010
