On the streets of Cuba

A technicolor array of 1950s American convertibles gathers daily at Havana’s Parque Central near the national capital. Most serve as taxis tourists can ride in.

SANTIAGO DE CUBA, Cuba — I climb into the back seat of a fire-engine red 1957 Chevrolet Bel Air taxi owned by Argelio Pena Mendoza here in Cuba’s second largest city. Mendoza turns the key, and the ancient inline six-cylinder engine wheezes and rumbles to life in a haze of exhaust smoke. He shoves the car’s three-on-the-tree shift lever into first, and we’re off.

Only Mendoza knows the secret of how the door handles work, so he lets me and my friend Tom in and out of the 58-year-old car as we tour Santiago’s highlights, including San Juan Hill, where Teddy Roose-velt’s Rough Riders won their biggest victory of the Spanish-American War in 1898.

Mendoza, a 60-ish man, pulls into a gas station. I wait for him to flip open the little chrome door on the left rear fin behind which the 1957 Chevy’s gas cap is famously concealed. But Mendoza’s car has no gas tank. Instead, he hoists the hood and pumps gasoline into a pair of 1-gallon plastic bottles under the hood in front of the radiator. These bottles are connected to the fuel pump by plastic lines. Mendoza opens the trunk to show me a hole in the floor through which I can see the road below.

“Maybe someday I will find a gas tank,” he says with a shrug. For now, he must make do, as do so many Cubans, whose mechanical resourcefulness never ceases to amaze me.

Mendoza says his father got the Chevy from his former boss: a wealthy man who fled Cuba for the United States before the 1959 Castro revolution and the subsequent U.S. trade embargo. The Chevy has been in his family ever since. The engine is original. The paint job is not.

Jeans Montero and his 1957 Buick Special at the Ernest Hemingway House just outside Havana. Montero’s grandfather purchased the car used in the late 1950s and it has been in the family ever since. Nobody knows how many miles it has clocked.

Cubans have by necessity evolved a different relationship with cars than Americans have. Rather than being traded in every few years, cars are revered as family heirlooms, refurbished continuously and passed down through the generations, more like homes.

These rolling relics of the Truman and Eisenhower eras, known as Yank tanks or maquinas, have become symbols of the endless inventiveness and ingenuity of Cubans fostered by years of economic hardship — years when nothing was thrown away, and everything was recycled.

Cuban mechanics did whatever was necessary to keep their cars running, whether that meant substituting an original Chevy engine with a Russian diesel or replacing tattered original bench seats with buckets from a Chinese car.

The classic cars here are almost like religious icons. Oil paintings of them adorn art galleries. Postcards and refrigerator magnets with images of the cars are ubiquitous in souvenir shops.

The old cars also serve as reminders of the deep friendship between the American and Cuban people that has survived more than a half century of embargo and political isolation.

“Americans have saved this country with old cars,” says Osvaldo Monteasudo Isla, an English teacher who was working at the Havana Biennial art exhibition. “Cuba is the largest living museum of American cars.”

A 1950 Pontiac on the streets of Trinidad, Cuba, after a rain storm.

To travel the roads and streets of Cuba is to journey back to a world before crossovers, computer-aided design, electronic control units, CAFE and collision regulations, electronic key fobs, navigation screens and catalytic converters.

During a two-week trip there in late May-early June, I saw vintage Chevrolets, Buicks, Pontiacs, Cadillacs, Fords, Mercurys, Edsels, DeSotos, Studebakers, Packards and Nashes, some dating from as early as the 1920s.

Nobody knows for sure just how many American classics are being driven daily on the roads of Cuba. Some estimates say 60,000. Until Cuba began loosening restrictions on vehicle ownership in 2011, the pre-revolutionary cars were the only ones that could be bought and sold.

Cars in Cuba fall into three categories: American cars up to the 1959 model year; Soviet cars such as Ladas, Moskvitches and Volgas; and cars imported after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, which include a mixed bag of Japanese, European and Chinese brands such as Geely.

Now that President Barack Obama has taken the first steps toward loosening the trade embargo, some Cubans worry what will happen to those cars in the first category, the cherished symbols of their national identity.

A 2010 Cuban law bans export of cars from the island. Even without that, the likelihood Americans might find cherry cars in original condition is slim because most have been through extensive alterations.

“There are a lot of Americans that have the dream of finding the rare car in Cuba,” Bill Warner, founder and chairman of the Amelia Island Concours d’Elegance car show, told Reuters last year. “For the most part, the cars you see on TV are really pretty hacked up. You’d find better cars here in the United States.”

Christopher Elias, the Cuban guide for my tour, told me: “I think they will find a way for the old cars to stay. They are too important to Cuba’s identity.”

I hope he is right. The two weeks I spent in this ravishingly beautiful country — perhaps the most photogenic place I’ve visited in a lifetime of traveling — left me with a sense that Cuba is changing at warp speed.

It’s impossible to overstate the impact of seeing all those cars from the zenith of Rococo American design in one place, still on the road. Compared with today’s sleek, technology-age machines, they’re like exotic tropical birds, creatures from another universe.

Best to catch them now before they start to fade away.

A 1959 Chevy in all its tailfinned glory in Santiago’s Parque Cespedes. 1959, the year of the Castro Revolution, was the last year American cars were imported.

Public transport in Cuba: Vintage American cars are frequently re-purposed in Cuba for other uses, such as this early 1950s Buick, now serving as a bus for workers and school children in the small city of El Cobre, 20 miles from Santiago.

Automotive News journalist Bradford Wernle with tour guide Pedro Diaz and driver Mario in a 1958 Chevrolet convertible parked at the Plaza de San Francisco, Havana.

The interior of this 1942 Willys in Santiago is anything but stock including late model bucket seats, gauges and steering wheel.

Cuba’s endlessly resourceful shade-tree mechanics take their vintage American vehicles right down to bare bones — and beyond — to keep them running. Often having no garages, they work on the street, as with this fellow rebuilding the rear end of his 1950 Chevrolet in central Havana.

Thanks to automotive historian John Wolkonowicz for help identifying some of the vehicles.

On the streets of Cuba