CU Classic Cars
6 June 2002

The New York Times - There is one thing about present-day Cuba that unfailingly leaves visiting Americans awestruck: the sight of streets filled with 1950's Chevrolets, Buicks, Fords, Chryslers and Cadillacs, some as well-maintained as those in the hands of vintage car collectors in the United States. The fleet, estimated at about 60,000, is believed to be the largest collection of classic American cars outside the United States, and is as much a part of the Cuban landscape as palm trees. But behind the shiny chrome and tail fins is a world of need, improvisation and sheer Darwinism. Cuban mechanics cannibalize Russian Ladas and Volgas for parts. They make exact replicas of 1950's hood ornaments and windshields from scratch. For brake fluid, they use a concoction of oil, shampoo and soap. "And it works!" says Julio, a taxi driver and one of the subjects in the PBS documentary, "Classic American Cars of Cuba," which is being broadcast in the New York area  on Channel 21 as part of a fund-raising drive for public television.  "Classic American Cars," to be shown nationwide in August, focuses on the remarkable survival of a byproduct of the revolution that gives Cuba much of its frozen-in-time quality.  The cars are far from being just a tourist attraction. After Fidel Castro took power in 1959, the United States imposed its economic embargo on the Communist island, halting imports of American consumer goods. People held on to them out of necessity; besides, they were certainly preferable to the boxy Russian and Eastern European models that eventually flooded the market.  Now, more than 40 years later, while the cars are still used for daily transportation, often as taxis, they have also become cherished heirlooms handed down from generation to generation within families, in some cases going all the way back to the 1930's. "They started with necessity, but now there's a pride in the cars," said Terrel Cass, general manager of WLIW in New York, the public television station that produced the one-hour program for PBS. "Everybody in Cuba seems to be a mechanic," he said. "Every two or three blocks you see a car jacked up and someone under it working on it." The ubiquitous car trouble points to a bigger problem: each day these cars get closer to extinction. Leo Eaton, the program's writer, producer and director, said he was told by Cubans that five years ago about one in every three cars on the street was a pre-1960 American model. Last November, when Mr. Eaton was in Cuba filming, only about one in every five cars was, he said. They are outnumbered by Lada compacts, Volga sedans and more recent European and Japanese imports.  American car enthusiasts who have organized in recent years to advocate for the Cuban antiques - some of them served as consultants to the PBS show - say the biggest threats to the cars are the scarcity of parts and lack of original factory literature to maintain them with uniform standards. A group known as TailLight Diplomacy formed under the aegis of the United States-Cuba Sister Cities Association, which promotes relationships between Americans and Cubans, has approached Cuban government officials to propose cultural exchanges among Cuban and American vintage car lovers. They hope to promote the classic cars as a national cultural asset, like the cable cars of San Francisco or the gondolas of Venice. To do their part, the Americans want to ship parts, from door handles to carburetors, down to Cuba by the container full, along with repair manuals, paint specifications and other information that would ensure they are restored to internationally accepted standards. "The performance standards we're advocating would make them last another 48 years," said Rick Shnitzler, the group's lead organizer and an urban planning consultant in Philadelphia. Mr. Shnitzler said only in Cuba have history and circumstance combined to enable a whole society to preserve the cars and turn them into a national treasure. Of the 60,000 vintage cars, about half are from the 1950's, another 25 percent from the 1940's and a similar number from the 1930's, Mr. Shnitzler said. Chevrolet, Buick, Ford, Dodge, Plymouth and Willys are dominant brands. Given the island's poverty, Mr. Shnitzler said he found the cars in surprisingly good condition on his last visit to Cuba, two years ago.  He said that while about 20 percent of the cars were in terrible shape because of collision damage or modifications, most have been kept in good or fair condition through sheer wizardry.  "Classic American Cars of Cuba" shows some of these magicians at work in unlicensed backyard body shops where 1950's bumpers and tailpipes are recreated and myriad other parts - some cars are so fully restored only an original panel remains - are adapted. The engine block may still be Chevrolet, one Cuban mechanic noted in the documentary, but the pistons are surely from a Volga. Mr. Shnitzler said that while such shortcuts would be frowned upon in the United States, he and other antique car lovers admire the Cubans' ingenuity and their ability to keep the cars running. "How these cars survived is like, How did they build the pyramids?" Mr. Shnitzler said in a telephone interview. "They're just magicians and wizards, pure and simple. They just take stuff from Russian vehicles and adapt parts, but the quality of the work is outstanding."  Just as in the United States, some Cuban car owners have organized in clubs: the PBS program features a rally in which car club members drive 500 miles round trip from Havana to the old colonial town of Trinidad, to meet and show off. Mr. Shnitzler dreams of face-to-face meetings between Cuban owners of, say, 1955 Mercurys and their American counterparts in the Bronx or Kalamazoo, so they can compare notes, share technical expertise and rhapsodize over their set of wheels. Ultimately, he said, there should be an exchange of the cars themselves. (Officials at the Cuban Interests Section of the Swiss Embassy in Washington did not return calls asking for comment.) Mr. Shnitzler said the quality of the Cuban fleet largely reflects the owners' respect for the vehicles. "The father's '47 Pontiac is the son's '47 Pontiac and the grandson's '47 Pontiac," he said. "Every car is a repository of Cuban history from Batista to the present."  Still, a further decline in the number of these American cars is seen as inevitable, particularly once the economic embargo is lifted and the door opens for American products like SUV's. Hope for the continued survival of the cars lies with the core group of owners, who have the same love for their antiques as those in the United States, where pre-1960 cars number in the hundreds of thousands and can cost anywhere from under $5,000 to more than $70,000 for a popular 1950's model in mint condition, said Douglas Drake, a national director of the Antique Automobile Club of America. "We're all in the hobby together," said Mr. Drake, who lives in Rochester. "They were forced into the hobby but it's become a passion for them to keep the cars going. Their interest and our interest is very much the same." But an American would have to go to Cuba to see a concentration of the cars filling the streets like a snapshot of 1950's U.S.A. come to life. Mr. Eaton said his program was inspired by such memories. "It was a sense of nostalgia for a time that has vanished everywhere else but on one level in Havana still exists," he said.