Despite Hungary’s recent rejection of right-wing prime minister Viktor Orbán, it’s still pretty dark out there—especially if you’re an immigrant, working class, or parent of a soldier.
In uncertain times, Roger Ezra Butterfield knows it helps to look to the past to see how others before us dealt with it all. In a ramp up to May Day, the Tampa chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America (Tampa DSA) will do just that during an Ybor City walking tour that promises to change anyone’s perception of the district as party-central or just a place that was home to cigar factories.
“Its history is alive as we make it,” Butterfield, a postal worker, union activist and researcher, told Creative Loafing Tampa Bay. “In this little corner of the post-Reconstruction South, the small port village of Tampa established a hub of multi-ethnic immigrant unionism and political radicalism in the cigar factories of Ybor City.”
The neighborhood, Butterfield added, was driven by workers. Men, women, Black and white, from countries like Spain, Cuba and Italy.
“Very often illiterate and speaking different languages, they overcame division and united in the workplace and beyond to imagine and build a new political reality,” noted Butterfield.
As Butterfield speaks this weekend, members of Tampa DSA will remind attendees that Ybor City was also frequently visited by political radicals like Eugene Debs and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, who inspired solidarity among neighbors—something DSA tries to do in its chapters across the U.S.
Tampa DSA’s Labor History Walking Tour meets at Centennial Park near the Immigrant Statue on Sunday, April 19 at 2:30 p.m. The group expects to cover just under 1.5 miles, and has planned an afterparty at La Sétima Club on the corner of 7th and Nebraska Avenues. A $10 donation is suggested, but Butterfield said “no one will be turned away for lack of funds.”
Ybor City Labor History Walking Tour
Time Sun., April 19, 2:30-4 p.m. 2026
Location Centennial Park, 1800 E 8th Ave., Tampa
Donations will go towards Tampa DSA’s campaign to cancel $1 million in medical debt in Hillsborough County; to do that the organization has partnered with the Undue Medical Debt nonprofit, and hopes to raise $10,000 locally.
In 2024, Kaiser Family Foundation said that in the U.S., more than 100 million people are burdened by medical debt to the tune of $220 billion. A 2022 report from Alignment Healthcare added that “34% of those with medical debt in Florida” had bills “totaling at least three months of living expenses.” That same year, the Health Council of West Central Florida added that in 2020, 37% of Florida Residents had a health need that they couldn’t afford.
Last February, speaking to this reporter on WMNF Tampa’s public affairs program The Skinny, Tampa DSA member Jules Lopez said the motivation for this campaign was simple.
“We’re a community, right?,” Lopez asked, adding that medical debt spirals people into poverty, and into homelessness. The need, Lopez said, is clear and the campaign aligns with DSA’s mission to advocate for an improved healthcare system. “We do this because we care. We do this because we love our neighbors, and we do this as an act of seeking justice.”
That explanation echoes how Lopez talks about being a Democratic Socialist over dinner at a family holiday.
“I tell my family that my politics are rooted in care and love for others. And it’s not enough that I just say the thing,” Lopez explained. “I want to make that meaningful in a real, concrete way.
Lopez takes it a step further, asking family members questions about why the U.S. even has a private health care system that makes it so people fall into poverty?
That spirit bleeds into other members of Tampa DSA, including co-chair Manny Ramirez, who recently took part in the Nuestra America Convoy, an international coalition that delivered critical humanitarian aid to Cuba.
Ramirez was one of about 600 people from across the world headed to Cuba to help. More than 35 tons of aid—including medication, supplies for women and more—was delivered, according to Ramirez, who also visited the Caribbean nation in 2022.
Addressing questions about where the aid was going, Ramirez, speaking to WMNF’s The Skinny earlier this month, said he hand-delivered supplies directly to Cubans, who’re no strangers to struggles related to the embargo.
But compared to his 2022 trip, Ramirez said that the streets were not riddled with the classic cars visitors are used to seeing, citing the fuel blockade.
“People were clearly exhausted,” he said before hinting at Cubans’ resilience. “But at the same, as we walked all over Havana, we saw folks playing dominoes in the streets, we saw kids skating around.”
That kind of joy—regardless of where your struggle is happening—is something Butterfield and all of Tampa DSA will try and bring to the surface this weekend, too.
“History is too often written for the victors, the 1%, the oligarchs,” Butterfield said. “The histories of working people, their struggles and triumphs and joys, are buried underneath the red brick roads of neighborhoods like Ybor. But nothing is lost to us as long as we can remember it.”
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This article appears in Apr. 09 – 15, 2026.