The year is 1930-the place Ybor City (Tampa) Florida. It is here where a Cuban-American family impatiently await the arrival of a new lector whose job is to read books aloud to the factory workers as they earnestly hand roll cigars. When Juan Julian, the lector, arrives and reads Tolstoy’s infamous love story of Anna Karenina, the workers as well as the family, connect the story to their own lives. Some workers want to give up the tradition of the lector, but the culture of a lector is a custom that this immigrant family will not abandon.