The Cigar Maker [Paperback]

Mark McGinty (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 1, 2010

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 known for 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 into 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.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"McGinty creates a vibrant, hectic and exciting atmosphere as he describes the bolita games, cock fighting and the constant struggle between immigrant workers and the 'Captains' of the cigar industry." --The Tampa Examiner

"5 stars. The Cigar Maker is a fine read. Highly recommended." --Midwest Book Review

"There are desperados, kidnappings, cane fields set afire, riots, arson, stabbings, strikes, mercy killings, and desperate treks through tropical jungles. Through it all, Salvador is a modern day Odysseus."   --Historical Novel Reviews

Bronze Medal Historical Fiction
--2011 Independent Publisher Book Awards

Winner - General Fiction Honorable Mention
--New England Book Festival

Finalist - 2010 Book of the Year Awards: Historical Fiction

About the Author

Mark Carlos McGinty is a descendant of Cuban cigar makers whose work has appeared in  Cigar City Magazine and La Gaceta. He grew up on ropa vieja, Cuban sandwiches, café con leche, and fresh-squeezed OJ from his grandfather's tree in West Tampa. His favorite cigar is the Arturo Fuente Flor Fina 8-5-8. Mark's first novel Elvis and the Blue Moon Conspiracy won the Eric Hoffer General Fiction Book Award Honorbale Mention. Mark lives in Minneapolis with his wife and daughter.

Product Details

• Paperback: 464 pages
• Publisher: Seventh Avenue Productions (June 1, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0615343406
• ISBN-13: 978-0615343402
• Product Dimensions: 6 x 9 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (23 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,722,877 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Mark Carlos McGinty is a descendant of Cuban cigar makers whose work has appeared in Maybourne Magazine, Montage Magazine, La Gaceta and Germ Warfare. His novel The Cigar Maker won a Bronze Medal at the 2011 Independent Publisher Book Awards and was named Finalist at both the ForeWord Magazine Book of the Year Awards and the 2011 National Indie Excellence Awards. Mark lives in Minneapolis with his wife and daughter.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Couldn't Put it Down June 23, 2010

By Kevin Cannon

Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase

The Cigar Maker is a feast of a novel, a sweeping portrait of Salvador and Olympia Ortiz, who find themselves struggling with the growing pains of both their uprooted family as well as the new American city they call home.

The book opens with an unlikely romance between Salvador, a Cuban bandito, and Olympia, the daughter of a wealthy Spanish plantation owner -- an explosive love that McGinty cleverly mirrors with the explosion of the USS Maine and the resulting Spanish American war. From the wild jungles of Cuba the reader is catapulted to the wild streets of Ybor City, Florida, where every member of the Ortiz family quickly becomes enmeshed in the thriving cigar industry. McGinty introduces a wealth of characters, including Armando, the corporate bully who builds his empire with the help of corrupt cops and rigged bolito games, and Mendez, the lector whose fiery rhetoric helps paralyze the entire city.

McGinty does an expert job of rolling pulpy adventure sequences -- a bloody fist-fight in an alley, an escape from a Central American jungle -- with enough historical background to make you think you've just stepped out of a seminar on turn-of-the-century labor relations. But the meat of the education is about the cigars themselves. And to McGinty's credit the narrative never stops pushing forward toward its climactic and extremely satisfying end. The lessons about how cigars are made -- and how the industry affects the lives of its workers -- are woven seamlessly into the story, and left me with a great appreciation of cigars and, of course, cigar makers.

For transparency's sake I should note that I was hired to draw two maps for The Cigar Maker, so it's possible that I'm a bit biased. But as someone who is an impatient reader, and who has a habit of reading only a few chapters of a book before moving on to the next one, I can honestly say that I couldn't put this one down.

Highly recommended.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars From The Smoking Poet (thesmokingpoet.com) September 16, 2010

By Michael K. Parsons

Format:Paperback

The Cigar Maker is the story of the Ortiz family as it struggles to survive the personal and political climate of Ybor City (the Cuban section of Tampa) at the turn of the 20th Century. The patriarch, Salvador, is trying to support his family and escape his past as a Cuban rebel; but his past and the politics of his present conspire against him. He raises his children with one simple edict: "Work hard or die like dogs!" It all seems to work until the 1899 Weight Strike. Then we begin to see the dark forces working to control not only the cigar trade in Tampa (and hence, the entire country) but to control the underbelly of the city as well. Armando Renteria begins consolidating his power early by taking control of Tampa's underworld, but eventually sees that the only way to ensure his long-term survival and profiteering is to take over Vasquez and Company, a prominent cigar manufacturing company, and eventually run for mayor of Tampa. He sets out to silence the radical elements of the worker's union (La Resistencia) that nearly destroyed Vasquez and Company during the Weight Strike and has the leaders--Salvador Ortiz, the unintentional union leader; Gabriel Mendez, lector and radical newspaper publisher; Juan Carlos, the violent ex-Cuban rebel; and official union leader Lapir--deported to the Honduras and left to die.

The Spanish-American War, Teddy Roosevelt visiting an Ybor (Cigar) City brothel and a story about a headless rooster, provide a colorful backdrop for what is essentially a family story. The Ortiz family epic is also a quintessentially American story--one about poverty, struggle, and success--and while the novel demonstrates what happens when too much power falls into the hands of too few people, it also highlights the peril of there not being anyone in control-- not the city government, not the union, and most certainly not the cigar factory owners. The tension between the worker and the factory owner gets played out over and over again in the news, even today. The arguments over which is more important--a living wage and safe and dignified working conditions versus corporate profits at the expense of both worker and consumer--are also alive and well in our country's political dialogue today.

If there is a place in the writing where the desire to write quality historical fiction and the impulse to be historically accurate run into one another with questionable result, it's in the final chapter. While it seems like it might make for an interesting epilogue to know what happens to all the primary characters, the final wind down reads less like fiction and more like a series of obituaries; for this reader, it read as if the writer didn't know how to let them go when the frame of the story ended. But characters such as these would be difficult to release, in the same way that people never really let go of their roots in spite of time, distance, and the muddling of history that happens from telling to retelling to rehashing.

McGinty's writing is deliberate, informed, and interesting, and he pays homage not only to the family history that inspired the writing, but to the larger American tale of which The Cigar Maker is part. He weaves together a tale that makes for intensely interesting reading; a mixture of The Godfather, The Buena Vista Social Club, Scarface, and The Waltons, there are story lines here for a wide variety of readers. Mixing history, fiction, and the crucial work that myths and old family tales does on our private and communal lives, The Cigar Maker earns a 99.

-- Mick Parsons, Cigar Lounge Editor, [...]

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars A Window into Another Place and Time April 19, 2010

By Celia Hayes VINE™ VOICE

Format:Kindle Edition

One of the joys of reading historical novels is that the reader is afforded the opportunity to open a window into another dimension, to venture into places, people and events - and as nearly as possible and given a writer of sufficient skill and imagination - to explore and experience them at first hand. There is even a bonus, when the author like Mark McGinty takes up the story of his ancestors, weaving together the many threads of the vibrant and lively community they lived in: the Cuban community of Ybor City - now part of Tampa, Florida - at the turn of the last century. In basing a story on actual recorded historical incidents and real people, the reader is blessed with a narrative more incredible and fantastic than anything a writer could create of whole cloth - such as the incident that opens the story. Did it really happen, the loosing bird in a cockfight in Ybor City, eleven decades ago, having it's head bitten off by it's humiliated owner? The writer's grandfather insisted that it did - and thereby opens the tale, of Salvador Ortiz, one-time rebel and bandit, and his fiercely proud and independent wife Olympia. Salvador is now a cigar maker, a man with a particular and valuable skill - but Cuba is torn by war and ravaged by epidemics. For the sake of their children, they move to Florida; not quite an out of the pot and into the cook=fire move, but not without perils and dangers. At first Ybor City is a safe refuge for the Ortiz family - an escape from violence and famine and disease. Alas, they have exchanged one set of challenges and risks for another set, only slightly less challenging. In the next few years, Ybor City and the cigar-making industry will be racked by strikes and violent confrontations between the cigar workers, the factory owners and the Anglo establishment. Salvador Ortiz - a modest man of flinty integrity, soft-spoken and yet capable of decisive action when the necessity calls for it- will almost by accident become a leader among his coworkers. He struck me as a reader, as being the most fully-developed character, the moral center of a world filled with either well-intentioned characters without the courage to act on their good intentions, or amoral barbarians all too eager to act on their bad ones. Salvador is an immensely appealing character, not least to his wife, Olympia; the daughter of an aristocrat who nonetheless say something worthy in a man several degrees lower than she on the social scale.
The working-class Cuban émigré world of Ybor City, in the first years of the 20th century is lovingly detailed; the vigorous personalities, customs and conversation, the foods and festivals, the work-day world of the cigar factories, and the recreations - cockfights and bolita games being only a small part of the entertainments brought by the Cuban cigar workers. I had never realized that there was a substantial Cuban community in Florida that early on; I had assumed that Castro's Revolution was largely responsible for the current Cuban Diaspora. For a window into an unexpected and fascinating world - the Cigar Maker is recommended.