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I recently had one of those serendipitous moments. You know, like that old TV commercial where one guy with a bunch of chocolate runs into another guy with peanut butter and they go down in a big messy heap, only to discover that the two ingredients go well together and voilà, a new candy treat is created. It was one of those kind of moments. It happened the day 81-year-old Fidel Castro finally decided to step down and let his 76-year-old “kid” brother Raoul run Cuba. There was a photo of a Cuban street scene on the front page of the Wisconsin State Journal, along with several stories about the handover of power. I always liked those Cuban street photos because of the cars. They are like a time capsule, sealed when Castro took over 49 years ago. They don’t easily get new cars in Cuba, so the country has been a real-life “Twilight Zone” episode where the years keep adding up but the people keep using the same cars. There must be some fantastic, creative auto mechanics in Cuba. If they can’t get cars, they probably can’t get decent parts. So they improvise, invent, patch, make their own, and jerry rig things to keep these vehicles on the road. Here we see a ‘53 Pontiac being used as a taxi. Here’s a ‘58 Ford station wagon that several people share. Here’s a group of guys working under the hood of a ‘55 Chevy coupe, curbside, all obviously interested in keeping “Old Betsy” running because they all depend on her.
So here’s the serendipity part of my story. On the same day as Fidel’s farewell, I received my May issue of Rod & Custom. There it lay, right next to the paper on the kitchen table, with the front cover announcing, “’49-54 Chevys: Still Affordable & Cool!”
I think you can see where I’m going with this. True car buffs are always on the lookout for a “find,” like Aunt Bertha’s 30-year-old cream puff that she can’t bear to sell, but that’s been parked in her garage since she quit driving, during the first Bush Administration, with a grand total of 12,324 miles on it. Or the old car or truck stashed and forgotten in some farmer’s barn. I used to think they were myths, but I know of too many cars that have been discovered that way.
So we’ve got cream puffs and barn finds—how about island finds?. There have got to be thousands (National Public Radio reports 60,000) of classic, vintage American-made cars on Cuba. True, they are not cream puffs. They’ve been used and abused and have huge numbers of miles on them. But that doesn’t bother a real car man. These diamonds in the rough are raw material to be reborn, rebuilt, and restored. What an overture of new relations it would be between the U.S. and Cuba if we could connect these extremely used cars with interested buyers here.
—John Gibbs
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