Ybor City: He wrote the book Fluent in the culture and flavor that was Ybor City, this student and product of the Cigar City recalls its glory as a man who will never forget his first love. By JOHN BARRY, Deputy Floridian Editor Published July 22, 2006 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- TAMPA Generations from now, University of Tampa students researching the history of Ybor City will find a phone book-thick volume by Frank Trebin Lastra. It will make them think differently about Ybor. They will see it not as a term-paper curiosity, but as a strange, beautiful place. They'll discover this old Ybor expression: Le ronca el coco the coconut snored. In Ybor it meant: It's a strange situation. They'll find this as well: Le chifla el mono (the monkey whistled), which meant to Yborites: It's very cold.They'll also find that in Ybor a Ford was called un fotingo, and a Chevy was un chivoloco. They'll find that everyone had a nickname, usually not so flattering. There was Cara Papaya (the face of a papaya fruit); Boca Chivo (billy goat's mouth); Bisco (cross-eyed); El Sapo (the frog); and Rompe Hueso (bone crusher). And this only-in-Ybor moniker: Huevo Frito Huele Bicho (fried eggs smells like bugs). And the students will learn this. By the close of the 1960s: Ybor City was like a lovely woman who had been raped and abandoned. She would gather herself and try to regain her composure, her dignity, her self-confidence - but she would never be the same. All these things the students will find in Frank Lastra's 488-page, bittersweet, 10-year "labor of love," Ybor City: The Making of a Landmark Town, just published by the University of Tampa Press. Lastra's book is partly a history told through 89 pages of maps and tables, 633 photos and illustrations, and list after list after list: bakeries, cigar factories, streetcar lines, Lions Club presidents, children's games, cafes and newspapers among them. They are "reference materials for centuries to come," the author says. It's also partly history observed through the eyes of a boy who grew up during Ybor's best years, and who returned during its worst years for a dying father who needed him. * * * Frank Lastra is 83. He likes to remind people of that when they press him for time. He speaks gently and answers questions at length. He wouldn't think of neglecting to brew Cuban coffee for a guest. He started work on his book when he was 73 and afraid that his Ybor would be lost to future generations. His Ybor was not just an old community, it was a unique social experiment, unlike any other in the United States. He was part of it. His mother was Sicilian. His father was Spanish. They shared the town with Cubans and Romanian Jews. All were drawn to Ybor by its namesake, cigar mogul Vicente Martinez-Ybor, who had odd ideas about labor and community. He made Ybor a place where factory workers did not live in tenements, but rented to own the cottages Martinez-Ybor built for them. They created mutual aid societies, precursors of HMOs, that provided health care from cradle to grave. Their social clubs were "magnificent buildings," with libraries and theaters accessible to factory workers. A trilingual culture flourished. A poor family might know all the Italian operas. An illiterate cigar roller could know Don Quixote, read to him at work by employee-paid lectors. There was no place like it anywhere. Why have I written this book? Lastra writes in his preface. The answer is simply pride and fear. Pride in the town's heritage. . . . And fear that time will eventually leave this heritage behind, forgotten, or, perhaps, inadvertently destroyed. Lastra's mother, Ana, rolled cigars. His father, Evaristo, sold real estate. During the summer, Evaristo insisted on taking his boy along on sales. So they explored Tampa together in their fotingo Model T, hunting hot property. They sometimes ended up under shade trees, swapping stories with other men. The main topic of discussion: the Spanish Civil War, the warmup for World War II that claimed 640,000 lives in three years. The long nightmare was keenly shared in Ybor, where the many Loyalists to the Spanish Republic walked on one side of the street and the few Nationalist followers of fascist Franco walked on the other. That experience forms the heart of Lastra's history book. The magic resides in the small intangibles, the passions, the yearnings for dying ways, the eccentric gestures and Latin courtesies. "I was my father's only son," Lastra said. "He took me every day, and I'd sit with him as he drank coffee with his friends. I was fascinated. They would gather under the sycamore trees, some of them lying against the trunks. They met every evening before supper." There was decorum, what he calls "the beautiful attributes of our people." His father religiously made the rounds at Christmas to present Spanish Turron candies and red wine to friends. There was propriety. "You would not use the familiar tu when speaking to a lady. You would always use usted." (Gallantry wasn't always the motivation; small Ybor was rife with gossipers.) When the fathers weren't around, boys like Lastra reverted to mayhem, Ybor style, mostly waged at Cuscaden Park, across the street from Lastra's home. Their preferred weapon was la honda, the slingshot. La honda bore no resemblance to Dennis the Menace's forked slingshot. It was more like the sling David used to slay Goliath. It consisted of a strip of tire rubber, a long cord and a leather pouch. "The Ybor slingshot was a very accurate and lethal weapon," Lastra recalls. "A half-inch diameter marble would easily travel 600 to 700 feet. Any bird within 200 feet had a 90 percent chance of being knocked down in the course of three or four shots."* * n Lastra grew up and left. He joined the Army during World War II, was sent to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to train as an engineer, then went on to Georgia Tech to complete his degree. He fell in love at first sight with his wife, Gloria. ("This is it," he said when he met her getting off a bus in Atlanta.) Then he got an engineering job at Continental Can in Chicago, where he and Gloria began raising their two children. That should have been it for Ybor. Then his mother called. "She said, 'Mi Ninito, your father is behaving very strange. I'm afraid.' " She told him that Evaristo would say her, "Who are you? Does my wife know you're here?" The diagnosis was Alzheimer's. Lastra told his mother, "Mama, I want you to get a clipping from any newspaper about an engineering job." She sent him an ad for an opening at Honeywell Aeronautical in St. Petersburg. He went home. His father didn't recognize him either. * * * Ybor was a withered shell. The cigar industry had collapsed. Founding fathers "were either dead or too old to lead." Those great cradle-to-grave safety nets, the social clubs, had faded. Even Ybor's famous Latin balconies were threatened by a new Tampa ordinance prohibiting them. Blight settled in. The construction of Interstate 4 "struck a dagger in the heart of Ybor City," Lastra wrote. What was left was decimated by what was euphemistically called Urban Renewal. In 1966, the bulldozing of Ybor's core began, he wrote. All honest, self-respecting men and women rebelled in their hearts at this raping of their town.* * n Lastra stuck it out. He worked at Honeywell for six years until the company announced his transfer to its Wisconsin headquarters, and he quit. He opened a hardware store in Lutz and ran it with Gloria. He served as director and president of the Ybor Chamber of Commerce. He devoted himself to historic preservation. Now he tries to put it all down in books. He works out of a cramped office in his home in Carrollwood, haunts the archives at the University of South Florida. Once a week, he takes a Cuban coffee at the counter at the Tropicana. He acknowledges Ybor's partial, hard-fought comeback, culminating with its designation as a National Historic Landmark District in 1990. He credits two native sons - former Mayor Dick Greco and his business and community director, Fernando Noriega - with "a significant and enviable record of improvements." And he credits the Ybor City Museum Society for its rescue of the tiny, graceful, cigar rollers' cottages. But he devotes himself as much to dire warnings of the future as to nostalgic looks at the past. Those traditional Latin values he loved? Usted is a rarely spoken word. Leisure on Seventh Avenue depends on how many quarters you pump into ruthless parking meters. Even the town's unique musical heritage is under assault by the onslaught of non-representative music pouring from the shops and clubs, he writes. As I conclude this history, the Ybor City story I have told is in danger of being overwhelmed by new wet venues, clubs and concepts foreign to the historical fabric of the area. There is a real threat here. . . . Ybor must be true to itself. There, monkeys whistle and coconuts snore. * * * Ybor City: The Making of a Landmark Town, by Frank Trebin Lastra, is available from University of Tampa Press. To get the book, call (813) 253-6266 or go to utpress.ut.edu. John Barry can be reached at (727) 892-2258 or jbarry@sptimes.com. [Last modified July 21, 2006, 12:06:09] |
http://cubanmadecigars.com/ind.html |
