Both my grandfathers came from Cuba in the early 1900s. Both were professional orators, men who read to the cigar workers as they rolled cigars in vast factories, entertaining and educating the workers. They were highly respected and admired members of their communities, fiercely independent private businessmen who competed among themselves by the quality of their speaking voice, the elegance of their Spanish, and their selection of material.

They left Cuba because the Spanish-owned factories left for the USA, for the more business-friendly (read "union free") atmosphere of Key West and Tampa. After Cuba was free of Spanish rule, the owners found they could not get away with what they were used to under the the Spanish Crown.

The orators were not paid by the factories, but by subscription from the workers themselves. In fact, the owners did not like the readers, they taught the workers that they had a voice, that they could organize for their rights and stand up to the bosses. They read to them about American parliamentary democracy, imagine that! Dangerous, radical stuff.

They read them the news, (local and Cuba), entertainment, the classics and the latest labor literature and philosophy. The workers weren't peasants or proletarian wage slaves. They were the aristocracy of labor, a proud, cultured, urban people whose colonial history alone went back unbroken to the sixteenth century. Not only did they negotiate with the owners, they operated their own medical insurance co-ops through their social clubs, since the US, unlike little Cuba, did not allow "socialized medicine".

Theirs was a skilled trade with a long apprenticeship, the tobacco techs were hard to replace and they were able to hold their own against the owners until the cigar-making machines and the cigarette replacing the cigar (brought on by the Depression hard times), allowed the owners to get rid of the readers because they could now hire any English-speaking bum off the street to operate a cigar-making machine. They still needed a little commie-baiting help from the local anglo authorities, who didn't like these "anarchists" much themselves.

I come from a long and proud tradition that believed in the dignity of labor and had experienced first hand for centuries the fundamental treachery of the factory owners. My people didn't come here to own land, we came here to practice our trade with dignity and respect, not as disposable wage slaves.

Long after that industry was gone, their children, my parents, realized that without knowing how to do something well you were just trash to the people who employed you. Education was important, because as just a worker, you did not count.

Property rights my ass. This is the 21st century. We can't all be gentleman planters any more. In fact, we never could be. The openings in that job description were always rather limited, even in i8th century Virginia.