Cuba's Car Culture

Celebrating the Island's Automotive Love Affair

Tom Cotter, Bill Warner

• Publisher: Motorbooks
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780760350263
• eBook ISBN: 9781627888813
• Topic: Technology & Engineering
• Subtopic: Latin American & Caribbean History
• Index: Technology & Engineering

Cuba's Car Culture drives through Cuba's love of American cars of the '40s and '50s, and the ingenuity that keeps them running despite the U.S. embargo.

2017 Silver Medal Winner of the International Automotive Media Competition! 

The story of how Cuba came to be trapped in automotive time is a fascinating one. For decades, the island country had enjoyed healthy tourism trade and American outpost status, and by the 1950s it had the highest per capita automotive purchasing of any Latin American country. But when Cuba fell to communist rebels in 1959, so ended the inflow of new cars. Since then, trade embargo forced Cuba's car enthusiasts to develop a unique and insular culture, one marked by great creativity, such as:

-Keeping a car alive with no opportunity to acquire replacement parts
-Customizing a car with no access to aftermarket parts
-Drag racing with no drag strip

In many ways, Cuba is an automotive time warp, where the newest car is a 1959 Chevy or perhaps one of the Soviet Ladas. Cuba's Car Culture offers an inside look at a unique car culture, populated with cars that have been cut off from the world so long that they've morphed into something else in the spirit of automotive survival.

Authors Tom Cotter and Bill Warner (founder of the Amelia Island Concours) take readers on a whirlwind tour of all things automotive, beginning with Cuba's pre-Castro car and racing history, up to today's lost collector cars, street racing, and the challenges of keeping decades-old cars on the road.

Cuba's Car Culture is illustrated throughout with rare historical photos as well as contemporary photos of Cuba's current car scene. For anyone who enjoys classic cars, whether they're old Chevy Bel-Airs, Studebakers, or Ford Fairlanes, a cruise around Cuba will make you feel like a kid in a candy store.

1

WELCOME TO CUBA:
SET YOUR WATCH BACK FIFTY YEARS

OUR STEP BACK IN TIME DIDN’T OCCUR AS WE STEPPED ONTO CUBAN SOIL, BUT ACTUALLY BEFORE WE LEFT MIAMI. THE JET THAT WOULD TAKE US TO HAVANA, JUST OVER 200 MILES AWAY, WAS OWNED AND OPERATED BY HAVANA AIR BUT LIVERIED AS EASTERN AIR LINES. YOU REMEMBER—THE AIRLINE THAT WENT BANKRUPT TWENTY-FIVE YEARS AGO? DAVID NESSLEIN, CEO OF HAVANA AIR, ACQUIRED THE EASTERN NAME AND LOGO, AND NOW OPERATES “EASTERN” AS A CHARTER AIRLINE FLYING FROM MIAMI TO HAVANA AND BACK DAILY.

WE RECEIVED PERMISSION TO VISIT CUBA TO CONDUCT RESEARCH ABOUT THE COUNTRY’S AUTOMOTIVE HISTORY.

The prettiest cars, mostly convertibles, await tourists on the plaza outside the Parque Central hotel in central Havana.

Uber it’s not—a 1952 Buick taxi prowls the back streets of Havana in search of a fare. This is likely a taxi for Cuban residents, since tourists prefer the shiny convertible cabs. wellsie82/Getty Images

Although we would have preferred to visit the island in January, February, or March—when the weather must resemble paradise—July, with its heat and humidity, was the only time that all three of our schedules were clear.

The reason we were going to Cuba was specifically to research this book. Our car-guy friend Wellington Morton had the week off and offered to accompany us on this trip.

We walked down the stairs of our Eastern jet, across the tarmac, and into the lobby of Havana’s José Martí International Airport, where the scene in front of us could have been a movie set from a 1950s flick about a banana republic. Flights from around the world use the larger, more modern terminal across the runway, but flights from the United States are relegated to this smaller, antiquated, and rundown one. No doubt it’s punishment for the embargo that the United States put in place in 1962 after Fidel Castro came into power. We’d soon discover that the worn-out airport was representative of the condition of just about everything else we’d see in the country.

We noticed this Ferrari decal on the fender of a Russian Lada. It is an accessory that even Cubans can afford!

Once we retrieved our luggage, which for no good reason took way too long (probably more punishment for Americans), we walked through the exit and toward the curb. We passed waving people who were probably seeing a family member from the United States for the first time in fifty years, taxi drivers holding crudely printed signs, and well-dressed tour operators ready to whisk away affluent vacationers to exotic resorts on the far ends of the island.

Then we saw the guards holding machine guns.

Once we made it through that crowd, we finally noticed what we’d come here to see: old cars that looked appropriate in front of the sixty-year-old airport terminal building we had just exited. There were pink Ford Thunderbirds, finned Cadillacs, Plymouth station wagons, red Chevy convertibles, mag wheels on nearly everything, and Ferrari stickers on vintage Ramblers.

Welcome to Cuba, the country that time forgot. The flight from Miami was just forty-five minutes, but that Eastern Air Lines jet had doubled as a time machine, bringing us and the rest of the passengers back in time more than half a century.

US banks? Nope.

US credit cards? Nope.

US-friendly ATMs? Personal checks? Cell phones? Nope, nope, nope.

The Parque Central is a European-style hotel that is located in the middle of Havana’s business and tourist district. Taxis are parked out front to take you wherever you desire.

We stayed in the wonderful Hotel Parque Central. It might not have been the most authentic hotel on the island, but both the air conditioning and the mojitos were cold.

(Though US cell phones don’t currently work on the antiquated Cuban system, if you have a Cuban friend, they can buy a phone for you to use during your visit. If you don’t have that friend to expedite the process, however, it could take you a few hours.)

Thankfully we took care of many of those incidentals before we left the States. And thankfully we had pockets full of American cash that could be exchanged at a rate of nearly one to one for Cuban convertible pesos (CUCs), the currency used for visit...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• Foreword
• Introduction
• 1 Welcome to Cuba: Set your Watch Back Fifty Years
• 2 Cars and Castros Revolution
• 3 Colorful Yank Tanks
• 4 The Myth of the Romance
• 5 Island Cars: A Hundred-Year History
• 6 International Auto Racing
• 7 Leftover Classics
• 8 Running on Empty: Repair Shops in the Streets
• 9 When Cuban Cars Were New
• 10 Driving around the Island Today
• 11 Two Auto Museums
• 12 You Can’T Bring Them Home!
• Final Thoughts
• Bibliography
• Index
• Dedication
• Acknowledgments
• Copyright