Cira previously prepared and rolled cigars for two of the Tampa area's bigger makers, Tampa Rico and El Sol. However, about two years ago, she and her husband, Felix, opened their own enterprise at 1805 North 22nd Street in the historic Ybor City district.

Felix is gone this day, out-of-town on business. But Cira and Walter Prieto, another master cigar roller, continue to fill the Ybor Tabacalera presses with stacks of boxes, each box serving as a mold for 10 cigars.

Cira prepares the basic guts of the cigar by wrapping a binder leaf around several filler leaves and placing the resulting tubes into the molds. Once the cigars have been pressed in their molds for 45 minutes or so, Walter adds the final wrap. He expertly cuts this final leaf to a rectangular shape and rolls the tube tightly into the product that eventually will be shipped to a customer or displayed in the Ybor Tabacalera humidor. He cuts the wrapper leaf, rolls the tube over the wrapper and cuts the ends -- all in a flourish of just a few seconds. The final wrap he's rolling is a trickier piece to the making of a cigar, Cira explains. She must work over a moist towel and spray the leaves to keep them wet as she prepares them for Walter, because if the final wrapper breaks, the cigar's unusable.

The Huelgas use Dominican tobacco for the filler or guts of the cigar, Ecuadoran tobacco for the binder wrap and Indonesian and Connecticut tobacco for the final wrap. They produce 150 to 180 ready-to-smoke cigars daily and sell them in bunches of 50s and 100s to a regular base of customers -- some of them from the Tampa area, but most of them from outside Tampa. They also sell cigars from their humidor to walk-ins at $3 to $6 apiece, depending on the blend.

Cira says there are perhaps 10 master cigar rollers left in Ybor City's half-dozen shops. Why the smaller numbers?

"People usually came from Cuba long ago, and they knew how to make cigars," she explains. Emigration from Cuba no longer is so easy.

The dwindling number of cigar makers is in contrast to Ybor City's cigar-making heyday in the late 1800s and the early 19th century. Some 12,000 people worked in Ybor's cigar factories after Don Vicente Martinez Ybor founded the 40-acre district. A Spaniard and prominent cigar manufacturer in Key West, he chose the Tampa tract because of the area's climate and a growing transportation hub that included a new railroad and shipping port.

Thousands of immigrants -- Cubans, Spaniards, Italians, Germans and Jews -- eventually would make the district home, creating social clubs, hospitals, newspapers, restaurants (see related dining story, featuring the Columbia Restaurant), bakeries and cantinas. The center of activity, as today, was on Seventh Avenue, known as "La Setima."

Ybor became a main support center for the Cuban Revolution in 1898 when Teddy Roosevelt and the Rough Riders were based in Tampa.

In 1990, Ybor was designated a national historic landmark district.

The cigar industry's decline in Ybor also is attributable to the Depression and mechanization. But the district has experienced a renaissance as a popular hangout on weekends. And such events as Fiesta Day in February, Guavaween the last Saturday in October and Jose O'Reilly St. Patrick's Day Parade, plus monthly music concerts, farmers markets, arts and crafts shows and gallery walks, attract tens of thousands of visitors to the district.