While Cuba is known for the beauty of its vintage cars, they are more of a testament to the ingenuity of island mechanics than anything. US collectors won’t be enthused, writes Benjamin Preston

When the United States and Cuba announced last week that they would seek to normalize relations, automotive aficionados everywhere began speculating on the role Cuba’s many antique cars would play in a potential transformation of the island nation’s economy.



Old cars and trucks that, under normal circumstances, would long since have been retired or relegated to collector status under different economic conditions, have been kept running by any means possible as Cubans struggled under a decades-long embargo by the United States.



Today, the images of an isolated Cuba that reach the outside world often feature battered but brightly painted American cars that arrived on the island before Fidel Castro’s Communist regime took control of its government in 1959. Despite the island’s poverty, its roads have the swagger of big, tailfinned Chevrolets, Fords, Studebakers and Chryslers echoing a bygone era of American dollar-fueled prosperity.



Cuba relaxed some of its own trade restrictions on automobiles earlier in the year, allowing new cars to be sold on the island for the first time in half a century. But extremely high prices – $30,000 for a Chinese Geely, $70,000 for a Volkswagen and $250,000 for a new Peugeot, for example – have kept the flow of new vehicles to a trickle.

I see Cuba as the world's biggest car show. Brenda Priddy

Now, the end of the US embargo may mean that Cubans have a chance to make more money and buy new cars – leaving auto enthusiasts salivating at the idea of the vintage beauties that may be for sale on the tropical island. That may not be what they find, however.



“People seem to think that the automotive auction houses will go down to Cuba and scoop up all these old cars,” says Brenda Priddy, an automotive photographer from Arizona who has taken advantage of Cuba’s cultural exchange program to lead two car-focused tours there.

But the well-worn cars, many with Japanese diesel engines, are alluring only in photographs, Priddy warns: “Most of the cars there are not the ones anyone would want to bring back to the US.”



Michelle Krebs, senior analyst for Autotrader.com, said some collectors might want to see what’s available in Cuba, just like they would in any barn-find scenario. But she didn’t think Cubans would start unloading their old cars and buying new ones anytime soon.



“There’s a lot of pent-up demand, but there’s no money,” she said. “One of the things we might see first is more business in parts. People have been holding those cars together with shoestrings for years. They’ve been really resourceful.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Vintage cars at an intersection in Havana. Photograph: Carmen Cusido

Big swagger, but little of it



There is, naturally, a supply problem. Though vintage cars appear to dominate on Havana’s streets, they are actually few in number: only 60,000 cars to the island’s 11 million people. There’s not much money to buy more. Cubans are generally poor. The Cuban National Statistics and Information Bureau reported in June that the average per capita monthly salary there is about $22. Not many people own cars.

There are also many vehicles from the Soviet era, though the newer ones – of which there are more – tend to be unexciting, says Priddy. She said the colorful array of big American classics ties together the country’s carscape.



“I see Cuba as the world’s biggest car show,” says Priddy. “People are very passionate about their cars there.”

There are a few Khrushchev-era Russian cars in Cuba, and Lenny Shiller, president of the Antique Automobile Association of Brooklyn, said he could think of a few collectors who would be interested in them.



But most of the Russian cars there were imported in the 80s and 90s, Priddy said. They are not as elegant as their 1960s counterparts, and are much less flashy than the curvaceous post-war American cars – not the sort of machines that generate much enthusiasm, generally.

Held together with glue



“In general, you see a lot more old American cars on the road down there,” Priddy says, adding that many of them are used as taxis. “Most of the taxis are not in good shape – they’re practically glued together.”

Carmen Cusido, a Union City, New Jersey, resident whose parents fled Cuba for political reasons in the 1960s, made her first visit to the island last year. She never had a chance to ride in one of the old American cruisers while she was there, but traveled with some relatives in a 28-year-old Russian car.



“It was a little scary,” she said, adding that most tourists are shepherded around the island by a government-sponsored “minder” to specific places on special tour buses of much more recent construction. “The car was making really weird noises. They said it was fine, but I definitely said a prayer in the back seat.”

Vintage American car in Old Havana, Cuba. Photograph: Alamy

Some cars are missing lights, chrome trim and other smaller parts, and the variety of wheels and seats to be found is enough to make purist American classic car club members squirm.

Priddy said that parts are very expensive on the island nation, leading Cuban car owners to be very creative about how they keep their vehicles running. For some, that means putting newer Japanese diesel engines in 1950s Chevrolets. For others, it means something as simple as driving cars without any hubcaps.

Says Priddy: “You’ll see a car without a hood ornament, but you may see another with four different ones, all attached in a row. Sometimes you’ll see cars covered with 10 layers of house paint.”

A potential treasure may be a scrap heap



So what does the changing geopolitical climate mean for car collectors in the United States? While there’s really no word yet as to whether there will be any cross-border movement in the used-car market – or any market, for that matter – even an official change in the trade status between the United States and Cuba may not generate much interest in the relics.



Shiller, a longtime collector, compared the cars in Cuba with the weathered remains of Ray Lambrecht’s collection of mostly American cars and trucks in Pierce, Nebraska, many of which sold at an auction last year.



“There might be a little cachet to having a car that had been in Cuba, kind of like how some people paid a lot of money to have one of those cars in Nebraska with three miles on the odometer,” he said. “I just don’t think there’s going to be a lot of interest among American collectors. You can get anything right here”.



His view was shared by Keith Martin, founder and publisher of Sports Car Market magazine. Martin said that the current Cuba-focused “media frenzy” might result in a few high-dollar sales, but that, for the most part, there wasn’t much worth getting excited about.



“I can see the first couple of cars that are shiny and have some sort of interesting drive-train – Russian tractor diesel, for instance – bringing $50,000 or so at a Barrett-Jackson auction, if they are the first Cuban cars to sell publicly in the US,” he said. “But once the frenzy dies down, these will just be junky old cars whose existence is a testimony to the ingenuity of Cuban mechanics.”

