Metro Cigar News Spring 1998: Diamond Jubilee

Diamond Jubilee for
Tampa Cigar Roller

In a day and age when most marriages last barely longer than it takes the ink to dry on the license, Carmela Cammarata Varselona is celebrating her 75th year as a cigar roller in Tampa's Little Havana.

The 91-year-old woman's life still focuses around her work as a hand roller.

"This is what I do, what I know," Carmela says with a smile creeping across her wrinkled and wizened face. "I like making cigars."

Her grandson, Jim Tyre, is part of her regular routine. He stops at her home several times each week to pick her up for work at his tobacco shop, the Urban Centre Tobacco in the Sheraton Grand Hotel's plaza.

Carmela is always waiting at the door for his arrival, with a lunch she has packed for the two of them. This is probably the only place in the country where the employee provides lunch for the boss.

Tyre laughs and says that no matter what lunch is, it usually consists of a whole loaf of buttered bread, more in Italian tradition than Spanish.

Carmela's parents came to the United States, where Carmela was born, from Italy and Spain, accounting for the melded cultural tastes. Both learned cigar rolling after coming here and passed the craft on to Carmela and her siblings.

Although her own children drifted off into other professions and businesses, Jim Tyre is the only one with a connection to tobacco. Jim graduated college in 1985 and then went on to open his own tobacco shop.

Tampa and Ybor City were once the center of American cigars and hand rolling, but time and technology have taken over and the art is practiced by only a handful of people with machines today doing the bulk of the work.

Carmela earned a reputation among the hand rollers as a star, often doing the custom work needed for the better cigars. Watching her experienced hands move over the leaves as she cuts veins away and deftly places aromatic tobacco into the forms, its not difficult to picture Carmela in her heyday where she is reputed to have rolled between 400 and 500 fine cigars a day. Time and tide have taken their toll, and although she is still expert, her daily totals have dropped to the area of 200, still an impressive number.

Don't test her, however. Her hearing and fingers may have slowed down a bit, but her mind is as sharp as her tobacco knife and her eyes could give a wk a run for its money. As Jim and Carmela arrive at the tobacco shop, she chides him for being late because "there is a lot to get done." Although she considers it late, they are still at the shop in time to open it for its posted operating hours.

Putting the lunch away, Carmela tucks an apron over her flowered dress and at a work station in the front window of the shop, in full view of passing shoppers who, more often than not, stop to gawk at her flying hands.

"I enjoy it when people stop and watch," Carmela comments. "Most people have never seen how its done and they like to stop and watch."

She especially enjoys it when children's faces fill the window, watching in awe.

Carmela lifts her smiling face and looks at the youngsters, her hands rhythmically and rolling tobacco.

"What are we making today?" shell ask Jim, almost mechanically.

Her grandson brings forth the wrappers Carmela has previously prepared and she systematically goes to work. She estimates that some eight million cigars have come off her shaping forms in her career.

As a child, she says, she never wanted to do anything but roll cigars.

"I never wanted to learn anything else in my life but this," she says. But retiring is something she doesn't picture just yet.

"For me," Carmela said, "I'll have to retire some time soon. I'm too old to work, but I love what I do and people have to work."

Interestingly, although Carmela has been involved with tobacco since a corona was still only a ring around the sun, she has never smoked; not even her own products.

"I make them all day long," she said, "but, my gosh, I don't smoke cigars."

The Tampa native left the city for 17 years as a young woman and moved to Milwaukee because of a lack of work in the Florida tobacco industry. She took a job in a cigar factory there, but the cold winters took their toll and she moved her family back to Tampa.

She retired from her factory job in 1980 and since that time has worked in family tobacco shops. Jim Tyre's uncle owned Smokers' Den at Tampa Airport, where she rolled cigars before continuing to work for her grandson a dozen years ago.

Her career has included jobs in six factories, including Arturo Fuente, Bustillo and Gelling.

She currently rolls 10 different sizes for three blends. The first cigar she learned to roll was at the Bustillo factory, a family-owned operation.

"She always spoke fondly of the cigars and the Bustillo family as well," Jim remembers. "It had been out of business for a number of years and I decided to see if I could bring it back."

He contacted the Bustillo family and told them about Carmela and how she was still rolling cigars. Although Bustillo had begun making cigars in 1865, they had discontinued them in 1951.

Jim obtained the rights from the family to resume production. He was also given the right to reproduce the unique original art work and Carmela is once again producing Bustillos.

All of the tobacco and wrapper used by Jim and Carmela is purchased from Villazon in Tampa, still a strong force in the area. Many of the cigars are named for celebrities he has met or who have stopped into the shop.

There is a John McKay Super Rothschild, named for the former coach of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. Tyre also produces a Frances Ford Coppola, a cigar you don't need an offer you can't refuse in order to sample.

Tom Selleck, Milton Berle, Mike Ditka and Tom Petty are also honored as are wine maker Robert Mondavi, Jr. and former baseball player turned wrestling pro, Dusty Rhodes.

But to Carmela, none of them are celebrities. She sees them only as customers and she concentrates too hard on crafting the cigars to notice who is coming and going from the shop.

But she has been honored as well. Tyre features a Cammarata, a homemade corona that can only be purchased at his shop. The Grande Corona has been written up as being "as full-bodied as they get."

And earlier this year Carmela was the senior member (it would have been interesting to see if there was another cigar roller who was still active and could have beaten her age) of the hand rolling team that produced the world's longest cigar, measuring 22 feet, one inch long.

With only nine years left before the centennial celebration of her birth, Carmela has outlasted most of the farms that produced tobacco for her cigars, but even though her fingers show some signs of slowing, they still move with an expertise that is definitely from a bygone era.

Bob Nesoff