Ybor City is actually a historic neighborhood just northeast of downtown Tampa, Florida. It was founded in the 1880s by Vicente Martinez-Ybor and other cigar manufacturers and populated by thousands of immigrants, mainly from Cuba, Spain, and Italy.
On April 13, 1886, the newly opened Sanchez y Haya cigar company on 7th Avenue became the first place in Ybor City to roll a cigar. Hand-rolled cigars quickly became the primary industry in Tampa Bay, earning the community its nickname: “Cigar City.”
Over the next 30 years, more than 200 hundred cigar factories started up across the region, employing tens of thousands of people and turning what had been a tiny town in 1884 into a major metropolis by the turn of the 20th Century. At its peak, the cigar industry produced more than 500 million cigar a year and Tampa Bay cigars could be found in pool halls, board rooms and palaces around the world.
The industry gave rise to the Cuban sandwich, developed to feed cigar workers, funded the Cuban fight for independence from Spain, and even inspired a Pulitzer Prize-winning play, “Anna in the Tropics,” set among the cigar factories of Ybor City.
Ybor City was unique in the American South as a successful town almost entirely populated and owned by immigrants. The neighborhood had features unusual among contemporary communities in the south, most notably its multiethnic and multiracial population and their many mutual aid societies. The cigar industry employed thousands of well-paid workers, helping Tampa grow from an economically depressed village to a bustling city in about 20 years.
Those enormous factories have been replaced with touristy boutiques, but quality Cuban cigars were a key part of Tampa Bay’s cultural identity. You can still stop at several shops on 7th Avenue and watch Cuban masters roll cigars by hand the same way they’ve been rolled since 1886.

Now, I don't drink Florida Man beer and I wouldn't drink it because I'm thinking that Cigar City Brewing is way left of my ideology. But it is brewed in Florida and in an area that I always thought was a pretty cool place to visit. I used to go to Ybor City with my uncle and he would pick up cigars from a good Cuban friend of his and he also partook of several other vices while he was in Ybor City. Rumors are that you could get top shelf home-brewed spirits there if you knew the right people ... and my uncle knew the right people.