Vickie Rozell

Director/Dramaturg, Author, Editor

By Vickie Rozell

Written for the production playbill for TheatreWorks Silicon Valley’s Anna in the Tropics

When cigar makers came to the US from Cuba in the late 19th century, they brought with them not only their language and culture, but the tradition of el lector-- a man (and a few women) who read to the cigar rollers to entertain them.

The tradition of the lector was originally the solution to a problem. Cigar factories had hundreds of workers performing the hypnotic task of making cigars and they needed something to occupy their minds. So, each factory elected a presidente de la lectura and a workers’ committee, responsible for hiring and paying the lector.

Interestingly, the lector was not paid by the factory owners, but by the workers themselves. Each cigar roller (tabaquero) would pay about 25 cents a week to cover the lector’s salary. The lectors read in Spanish, the dominant language of the factories, from a raised platform, called la tribuna, so they could be seen and heard by everyone. They had to have a strong voice, to reach all the workers without a microphone, and an actor’s flair for the dramatic to bring the readings to life.

The lector read what the workers requested, usually local and international news and politics from newspapers in the morning and works of literature in the afternoon. That literature comprised some of the greatest writing of all time, including works by Victor Hugo, Charles Dickens, William Shakespeare, Émile Zola, Alexandre Dumas, Miguel de Cervantes, Leo Tolstoy, Karl Marx, and Lope de Vega. Because the workers were sometimes avid theatergoers, the lectors might also read librettos from operas scheduled to perform locally.

Most of the cigar workers were illiterate, so the newspapers, political tracts, and novels the lector read were often the only education they received. This was before radio was commonplace so it was the only way they could get news or be exposed to great works of literature. It was not unusual to hear workers involved in heated discussions, not just about news and politics, but about literature as well.

The rest of the community was also educated through the lectors, because the workers passed on the information and stories to their families. It was popular to go to local cafés and social clubs to discuss the news of the day, and the tabaqueros could hold their own with more educated people because of the lectors’ readings.

Lectors were often leaders in the community, and were at times labor leaders as well. In fact, the Cuban revolutionary José Martí was a lector in and around Tampa after his exile to the U.S. Because lectors read primarily what the factory workers selected, they were not personally responsible for an atmosphere that encouraged radicalism, despite what the factory owners claimed. Their readings, however, did help encourage and sustain whatever radical or revolutionary tendencies the work force already harbored.

The tradition of lectors in the factory was finally doomed by a trio of issues. First, the factory owners disliked the lectors, blaming them for labor unrest that was common at the time. Second, the Great Depression, which began with the stock market crash of 1929, meant fewer people could afford to smoke. Those who could, tended to buy cigarettes, which were substantially cheaper than handmade cigars, and cigar sales plummeted, forcing factory owners to cut jobs which cut the lectors’ salaries. Finally, the coming of mechanization in the factories in the late 1920s made it impossible to hear the lectors over the machines, the final blow in dooming these talented performers to obscurity.

© Copyright Vickie Rozell 2005, all rights reserved