c. 1865 – 1931 · cuba & tampa cigar factories · supplanted by the radio
he sat on a raised wooden chair at the end of the rolling floor — la tribuna — where he could be heard by three hundred pairs of hands. in the morning he read the newspaper. by noon he read a novel; the workers voted on the title and paid his wages out of their own pockets, a few cents each per week. don quijote was a favourite. so was anna karenina. the cigar called montecristo is named after the book a lector read aloud in havana in the 1850s.
the workers could not stop their hands for a book, but they could rest their eyes on a leaf and listen. it was the longest school in the world. illiterate rollers heard zola and hugo and martí in a sequence that ran for years. on the day the lector finished one novel he was clapped, and the next morning he began another. arguments about characters lasted weeks. the rolling floor smelled of damp tobacco and grew quietly literate.
in tampa in 1931 the factory owners banned reading aloud. it had been used to organise strikes — political pamphlets dressed as fiction, statistics dressed as poems. the workers walked out. they lost. the radio came in, set to music, and the chair on the tribuna was put away. in havana a handful of lectores still read, today, in a few state cigar factories. but the chair, where it survives, is mostly empty.
field note · they read standing up only when the news was bad. it was a small respect, and it was understood without being said.