Cuba: a tough place for drivers

By: Drivers.com staff

Date: Monday, 21. May 2012

Where is the world's largest collection of operating vintage cars? In Cuba, of course, where one might almost think they'd wandered on the set of a 1950s movie. Ancient Chevrolets, Oldsmobiles, and Thunderbirds trundle up and down Cuba's roads in various states of disrepair, but all still on the road thanks to the mechanical ingenuity of Cuban drivers.

Cuba has its modern vehicles, too, but these are almost exclusively government-owned for use by the state, the military, or commercial enterprises. So private drivers have to rely on pre-revolutionary American cars punctuated here and there by Moskovitches and Ladas from the '70s and early '80s when the former Soviet Union played a major role in shaping the Cuban landscape.

Some of the old cars look as they've been retrieved, almost as an afterthought, from the breaker's yard, as they lumber along emitting clouds of blue smoke. At the same time, a surprising number are in almost mint condition with gleaming chrome and shiny paint jobs.

Because of the U.S. embargo, paint, like most other commodities, is expensive and difficult to obtain so how such cars come by their elegant coach work is something of a mystery. Bearing in mind, also, that many Cubans officially earn only the equivalent of $10 to $20 a month, it's also puzzling how they manage to buy and then maintain them in the first place.

An old American car, for instance, will cost anything between $2,000 and $3,000 (admittedly a price that would make any North American car enthusiast salivate with envy) while the Russian models fetch only slightly less in a $1,500 to $2,000 price range. Then there's the problem of getting gasoline. It's rationed for private drivers to approximately one fill-up per month. Anything extra they have to pay for in American dollars at a rate of 90 cents U.S. per litre.

Not only that, old cars are heavy on repairs. It's a common enough sight on the streets of Havana, Santiago de Cuba and elsewhere to see drivers parked at the roadside, tinkering under the hood.

The state-owned garages don't usually handle this exotic market for repairs so to see how it's done a Drivers.com writer persuaded a taxi driver in one of the larger Cuban cities to take him to a typical garage.

The trail led through a bewildering maze of narrow streets and back alleys until it finally ended on a dirt lane still in the heart of the city. There, parked outside a wooden building no larger than a tool shed, a mechanic and his assistant were doing an engine overhaul on an ancient but still serviceable Chevrolet. The mechanic had the crankshaft out and they were busy hosing down the engine block.

They worked principally with hand tools and had a minimum of machinery-no hoists, lathes, drill presses in sight. Asked how, for example, he would repair a broken carburetor, the mechanic said he could usually fabricate one from two old ones. He spent a lot of his time looking for parts from cars that had outlived their usefulness.

Sometimes a car will end up with an entirely different power unit, a diesel rather than a gasoline engine, for instance. Then there are tires. New ones are prodigiously expensive for the average Cuban to afford and, while retreads are made locally, they may be on order for months.

If all this appears discouraging, it is. Many would-be drivers settle instead for motorcycles. Many more ride bicycles and the vast majority of Cubans take public transport or simply walk.

Because they're more economical on gas, motorcycles command a hefty premium with a used machine costing almost as much as a car. At one time, most of the bicycles in Cuba were imported from China. Now the island has its own bicycle industry, building rugged and practical machines exceptional only in that they have no gears.

This can be a drawback if one lives among one of Cuba's three mountain ranges. Once again, though, Cuban ingenuity comes to the fore. Some riders have fitted the local bicycle with a complete set of gears.

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