The following is excerpted from the New York Times. Times have been tough for Cuban owners of American cars since the Castro regime took power in 1959. An embargo from the U.S. has meant that Cubans have had to be very "creative" when it comes to servicing their vehicles; two-liter bottles serve as makeshift gas tanks, powertrains are scavenged from other vehicles to keep these cars going, long after their original engines and transmissions have gone to their reward. Rumors now say that Obama might lift the trade embargo, in light of facts like how Cuba is served for its automotive needs by companies like Volkswagen, Hyundai/KIA and China's Geely Motors. The flagging influence of the Castro regime on the world stage also means that as Cuba poses less of a threat to U.S. national security...well...the end of those creative Cubans might be at hand sooner than anyone imagined.


OOKING at it at nighttime from a third-floor balcony in downtown Havana, Ricardo's recently purchased four-door 1956 Chevy Bel Air, freshly painted, looked just the ticket. My stepsons, who live in the United States, wanted to show off their homeland to their girlfriends, who had accompanied them to Cuba, and Ricardo had offered to drive the four of them and two others to Cienfuegos, 210 miles distant, and Trinidad, 50 miles farther. Ricardo pulled up at noon sharp the next day, four hours late. The first thing the passengers noticed when they opened the trunk was five five-gallon cans of gas sloshing around where a spare tire should have rested. The car had no gas tank, and Ricardo had rigged a plastic siphon from a smaller tank under the dashboard. The four doors shared one outside handle, which was dutifully passed from door to door so each could be opened. Still, happy and optimistic, they poured a ceremonial splash of rum on the car's floorboard for good fortune, and lurched away.
After a couple of miles, Leonardo nonchalantly asked about oil. "I don't know," Ricardo replied. "I've never put in any in." The Chevy peaked at about 35 miles an hour. They stopped every five miles to suck gas into the siphon and feed the engine. Famished by late afternoon, they pulled over to a field and cut stalks of sugar cane to chew on. Then the most shredded of the four tires suddenly exploded, and the seven passengers roamed the nearest small town looking for a replacement. The best they could do was a tractor tire they whittled to size, then, with borrowed equipment, soldered in place.
Back on the road, a side window fell into the lap of a startled Juan Carlos. The car lacked windshield wipers, rear lights and bumpers, and none of the dashboard dials worked. Ricardo himself lacked a driver's license. The clutch pedal fell through what was left of the floor. Often they had to push-start the car after a stop. (The car did have a fully functioning theft-alarm system.) The '56 Chevy belched into Cienfuegos late that evening.
Ricardo's Chevy is one of an estimated 60,000 pre-1960 American cars roaming Cuba. About 150,000 existed at the time of the 1959 revolution, shortly after which the Detroit auto giants and all American manufacturers were forced to stop sending goods to Cuba to conform to the United States' embargo. Ricardo's car is far more typical than the ones that art directors love to put on the covers of books about Cuba to evoke a melancholy feeling. Movies about Cuba like "Buena Vista Social Club" turn the jalopies into objects of nostalgia by panning lovingly over a wheel-less Chrysler here or a Plymouth stalled in traffic there. Yet to get dewy-eyed about old American cars in Cuba is to get whimsical about our trade embargo against the island.
There is a feeling abroad in the land that Cubans love old American cars. Nothing could be further from the truth. Cubans love new American cars, not old ones, but the newest ones that they can get their hands on are 45 years old.
To own one of these vintages, known as cacharros, or less commonly, bartavias, in Cuba defines who you are, how you spend your time and how you wish to be known. When your plugs don't spark, when a faulty brake line can't be repaired, when your engine sputters into a coma, when you run into any of Ricardo's difficulties, you fabricate the equipment yourself, share with a friend, buy from a stranger. Or you put your car on blocks until the right part appears the next day, month or year. But when your motor purrs, when you accelerate effortlessly from second to third gear, when the doors click into place, you momentarily forget your difficulties and glide for blocks with a prideful smile, until you inevitably run into one of Ricardo's multiple problems. Could there be a more appealing metaphor for today's Cuba than cars from yesterday's America?
Cuba nicely exploits the fleeting nostalgia that envelopes foreigners when they first visit the island, so much that a government agency rents spiffy reconditioned old convertibles for visitors to tool around in. Capitalizing on the past is a time-honored enterprise throughout the world, and Cuba is simply taking advantage of its own limited resources. Most resourceful are the shade-tree mechanics who create parts. A 2002 film, "Yank Tanks," profiles these "doctors," who think nothing of transplanting a Czech engine under a Buick hood or a Russian carburetor within a De Soto chassis. One fellow fabricates chrome bumpers on his patio, while another makes brake shoes in his home workshop. Old American cars in Cuba, cobbled together from their comatose elders, are variations on the old Johnny Cash song, "One Piece at a Time."
It is the foreigners who rhapsodize about the cacharros. Two new books, "Cuba Classics," by Christopher P. Baker, and "Che's Chevrolet, Fidel's Oldsmobile," by Richard Schweid, speak of a love affair between Cubans and old American cars, but what choice have they had? In "Driving Through Cuba," the Irishman Carlo Gebler uses his search for a 1959 Cadillac Eldorado Brougham as his leitmotif. (He never finds one.)
The rattletraps, according to the Cuban-born Cristina García in her sweet paean to the clunkers in "Cars of Cuba," "positively explode with a riotous sensuality." Among Cubans on the island, the singer Carlos Varela uses the cars as a metaphor for the 1959 revolution in his song, "La Política no Cabe en la Azucarera" (roughly, "Politics Don't Fit in the Sugar Bowl"), including the line: "A friend bought a '59 Chevy/He didn't want to replace any parts/And now it won't budge." If the feared post-Castro foreign plunder of native art, antiques and coastline takes place, surely pre-1960 cars will become part of the pillage.
I once saw a functioning 1934 Plymouth on the streets of Sancti Spíritus, a town of about 100,000 in the country's interior, and I know how that sensation of visiting a living museum of old cars can unexpectedly creep up on you. Informally, when Cuba hands sit around and consider the opportunities that could arise when the United States and Cuba return to their senses, some fantasize about getting into construction or electronics, industries that may burst wide open. But after seeing Ricardo's '56 Chevy, I predict a great future in low-end auto parts. The Pep Boys, Checker Auto Parts, AutoZone — that's where it's at for Cuba of the future.

Tom Miller is the author of "Trading With the Enemy: A Yankee Travels Through Castro's Cuba."