Since he was born in Cuba and raised in Miami, Nilo Cruz's relationship with the city of Tampa—and, specifically, with a small subdivision of the town called Ybor City—might be surprising to some readers. Once one understands that Cruz was set on foregrounding the Cuban lector tradition in his play, however, it becomes clear that no setting for the play would have made more sense. In order to understand just why this is the case, it is important to look at the history of Ybor City itself, as well as the ways in which Cruz decided to meaningfully deviate from this history.
Ybor City is named after Vicente Martinez-Ybor, a cigar merchant who fled Cuba after the Ten Year War, waged with Spain for the island's independence, broke out in 1868. Originally fleeing to Key West, Ybor intended to move his factory to Texas, but a fruit merchant named Gavino Gutierrez convinced Ybor that Tampa, with its good climate and cheap land, would be a better place for Ybor to grow his business. Plus, railway entrepreneur Henry Plant had built a stop for one of his railways in Tampa, marking the city as a potential destination for commerce and tourism. With these considerations in mind, Ybor set up shop just north of Tampa's city center. In the decades that followed, he set up housing, infrastructure, and luxuries for the workers of his plant, the largest cigar factory in the world at the time. Ybor City flourished even after Ybor's death in 1896, continuing to be center of both the cigar trade and the Cuban community in the United States through the Great Depression. After the Depression, much of Ybor City's cultural landmarks were destroyed or repurposed into housing, a trend which continued throughout much of the 19th and early 20th centuries, particularly in the 1980s when artists and entrepreneurs bought up old cigar factory buildings to contribute to the process of urban renewal.
In sum, Ybor City was a dynamic yet fragile economic powerhouse that centered the Cuban-American experience rather early on in modern American history. For this reason, it was the place Nilo Cruz wanted to center his story of modernity, tradition, and all the complex facets of the Cuban-American experience, specifically during the real-life historical moment in which the lector tradition was being jeopardized (in the late 1920s and early 1930s, lectors were being dispensed with after the advent of mechanization, and many workers participated in strikes after their departures). Interestingly, however, despite the fact that Cruz researched the history of Ybor City extensively at a distance from the University of Miami, he did not ever travel to Ybor City or Tampa before authoring the play. This was done in an effort to maintain the imaginative power Cruz had in developing the scenes and their intimate, human moments, rather than flood his mind and imagination with real material and historical details. One other way in which Cruz chose to focus on the human interactions in the play, rather than on the political or historical background of the setting, was in deciding to center the play on Anna Karenina, a pivot from his early choice of Zola's populist romance Nana, which was read widely in the Ybor City factories. Cruz took such liberties with the history of Ybor in order to accommodate not just the romantic aspect of the play, but also its small cast: this is why, for example, Ofelia hires Juan Julian, rather than the factory's workers.
After writing the play, Cruz's connections to Ybor City and Tampa multiplied. In a more abstract sense, thinking about the connections between Tampa and Russia moved Cruz to think more about the local references to Russia in Florida, like St. Petersburg—located just across the bay from Tampa. More literally, Cruz became engaged with El Centro Asturiano, the mutual aid society for former cigar workers in Ybor City, and one of their board members, Willie Garcia, became a consultant for several stagings of the play. Moreover, several set designers and actors in the play visited Ybor in order to give the characters more of a sense of real history to accompany their onstage dramas. In the early 2000s, after the play's run on Broadway, Cruz also traveled to Tampa to stage the play there, receiving gifts from Ybor merchants as he did so.
