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The Role of the Lector
The lector, or reader, was an essential part of the Cuban cigar factory tradition from the 1880s until 1931. Because the work of the cigar rollers was repetitive and quiet, a custom developed of employing a lector to entertain the workers by reading aloud. The lector was hired and paid by the cigar rollers, not the factory boss, and read what the workers requested. He typically covered news in the morning (local papers, international political developments, the proletariat press) and novels in the afternoon. Despite the high rate of illiteracy among the workers, the lector provided profound intellectual and political access to both their local and larger worlds. By the late 1920s, large numbers of women began entering the factory workforce, and, through the strong force of their vote, the lectors began to read novels more romantic in nature, such as Anna Karenina.

Tolstoy and Anna Karenina
Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910) was born at Yasnaya Polyana, in Tula Province, the fourth of five children. His parents died when he was a child, leaving him to be raised by distant relatives. In 1844, Tolstoy began his studies of law and oriental languages at Kazan University, but, dissatisfied with the standard of education, he left in the middle of his studies to live in Moscow and St. Petersburg. He never completed a degree.
In 1851,Tolstoy accompanied his elder brother to the Caucasus and joined an artillery regiment. It was during this decade that Tolstoy also began his literary career, publishing the trilogy Childhood (1852), Boyhood (1854), and Youth (1857). Although his writing was initially autobiographical, he was a voracious reader of fiction and philosophy. During his formative years in the military, he read as varied and esteemed writers as Plato, Rousseau, Dickens, Goethe, and George Eliot.
Anna Karenina was written between 1875 and 1877 and is considered one of the greatest novels of all time. The theme of morality and social responsibility pervades the novel, but it is the passionate and tragic love story of Anna Karenina, a married woman in high society, and Vronsky, a handsome army officer, for which it is most famous and enduring.
After the publication, Tolstoy renounced all his earlier works. “I wrote everything into Anna Karenina,” he later confessed, “and nothing was left over.”

Cigars: The Shift from Handmade to Automation
“...The decade of the 1930s marked a turning point for Tampa’s handmade cigar industry and the Latin communities sustained by cigar workers. Just as the growth of cigar manufacturing in Tampa had originally attracted Latin immigrants to Ybor City and West Tampa, so too the industry’s economic decline brought the breakup of these communities. During the Great Depression of the 1930s, demand for luxury handmade cigars plummeted as smokers turned to inexpensive cigars and cigarettes. Manufacturers looked increasingly to cigar-making machines to cut costs and reduce their workforces. Because one machine could replace from ten to twenty cigar makers, desperate workers fought valiantly against the spread of automation, but their rear-guard action did little more than slow the process, as Tampa factories went out of business, relocated, or automated...In 1929 (the year of Anna in the Tropics), 13,000 cigar workers produced over 500 million cigars in Tampa. This number...rose to 700 million in 1955, when the local industry employed 5,500 people – only 2,500 of whom still practiced the old craft of making cigars by hand...The decline of Tampa’s luxury cigar industry spelled the doom of Ybor City as a Latin community.”
(pp.11-12, Tampa Cigar Workers by Robert P. Ingalls and Louis A. Perez, Jr.)