The Cigar Box Heart

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 Sometimes in search of freedom, sometimes to escape want, sometimes for revenge but often to avoid it, they came.  First from Spain to Cuba then later onward to America, porting desire and children, they fashioned from palmetto and sandspur Tampa’s Ybor City, the cigar capital of the world.  From this exotic and boiling cauldron of Latin want and Anglo greed emerged two men, different yet curiously similar, possessing the courage and ambition to confront ethnic prejudice and exploitation.  Radicalized by violence against his people, Rene is committed to the cause of oppressed workers.  Fabian is a lawyer who exercises his connections in the Latin underworld to become rich and powerful.  They are linked by a surprising secret and their forbidden love of the same woman.  Their rivalry will range across the excesses of Prohibition and the privation of the Great Depression.  Forwarding the immigrant claim, their progeny will support America through the trials of World War II and the schisms of Vietnam fighting all the while for their place in the country they consider home.