Federal Writers' Project – Life Histories/2020/Summer II/Section 10/Evelio Andux

Overview
Evelio Andux was a cigar box maker of Cuban descent and interview subject for the Federal Writers' Project who spent much of his life in Ybor City, Florida. During the Great Depression, Andux witnessed the effects of many sociopolitical issues on the Cuban community in Ybor, particularly race relations and labor disputes.

Early Life and Marriage
Andux was born May 6, 1902 as the youngest of twelve children. His mother died when he was four, and he grew up in Key West, Florida under the care of a Black nurse who he later financially supported. Andux married a woman named Esther and moved to Tampa circa 1923, at a time when resentment over both racial inequalities and laborers’ rights was brewing. He found work making cigar boxes but was unable to unionize with his fellow cigar box factory workers due to conflict with several white coworkers.

Ybor City
After a fire destroyed his house and belongings, Andux was forced to relocate with his four children to Ybor City, which served as a slum for poor immigrants in Tampa. There, Andux lived with one of his elder brothers in a squalid and dilapidated house that was meant to be demolished. Fifteen years later, when Andux made his statement for the Federal Writers’ Project to Stetson Kennedy on New Year’s Day of 1939, tensions were high amongst the residents of Ybor City as Black children were forced to segregate into different schools from many of their European and Cuban friends. Additionally, employers and lawmen were cracking down on sailors’ labor unions, several of which were locked in a fierce rivalry that dragged members of the Cuban community into violent confrontations. Despite these trying circumstances, though, Andux survived more than 30 years after giving his life’s story and died in Tampa on October 30, 1972 at the age of 70.

Personal Life
Andux, along with his wife Esther, was a firm believer in quality education and encouraged his children to complete high school. He and Esther had their four children in the first few years of their marriage. However, the couple seemingly did not want a fifth child, likely because of financial strains. In his leisure time, Andux enjoyed dancing in various “jook joints” and cafés around Tampa. Andux also spent a great deal of time constructing a miniature of the Cuban Club in Ybor City, which his family admired for its impressive architecture, lavish dances, and associated social medicine society.

Segregation in Schools
The prejudiced Jim Crow laws of the southern U.S. had a traumatic impact on the Cuban community of Ybor. Although many fairer-skinned immigrants were spared the cruel segregationist practices of Tampa-area white supremacists, Cubans of color were met with harsh treatment similar to that inflicted upon the African-American citizens of Florida. Forced to attend segregated schools, the Black children of Ybor were frequently placed in the care of woefully under-educated teachers of color who were improperly trained and had not completed the grade levels they were meant to instruct. This discrepancy in quality of education was exacerbated by the near-total lack of funding for Black schools in Ybor, which received a mere fraction of the budget afforded to nearby white schools, resulting in pitiful facilities and curricula for Black students. In fact, an investigation conducted in 1933 found that there was a staggering lack of educational resources for Black people in Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina, with only 16 legitimate four-year high schools for people of color between the four states.

Labor Disputes
The naval union culture of Ybor in the 1930s was quite strained by various political struggles. Tensions grew as a result of the police breaking up a sit-down strike by the National Maritime Union (NMU) aboard the SS Cuba, which resulted in all of the strikers losing their jobs. Moreover, the NMU, a union founded on the principles of inclusion and racial integration, found itself locked in a bitter power struggle with the International Seamen's Union (ISU). Though once united under the banner of the American Federation of Labor, the NMU had split from the far more conservative ISU on the basis of racial politics. An overtly segregationist waterfront syndicate renowned for its vehement racism, the ISU was chiefly characterized by its discriminatory practices, especially against Black individuals. The MNU’s clashes with the ISU became increasingly more violent in the late 1930s and eventually led to the destruction of both unions’ local headquarters during a series of vicious brawls. In the midst of this union conflict, the Cuban workers of Ybor were often pressured to choose sides. Aside from the ISU, racial bias continually plagued other aspects of the naval labor union culture of the Ybor area in the 1930s, as racist unions terrorized Black seamen and suppressed their influence with few repercussions. In particular, more than 500 Black workers were forced out of Tampa shipyard jobs by “lily-white” unions associated with the powerful and bigoted American Federation of Labor in 1939 with few governmental consequences, exemplifying the frequent and shameless “doublecrossing” of Black workmen by labor unions in southern Florida.