Ebook: Cuba's Car Culture Celebrating

Welcome to Cuba's automotive time capsule, filled with classic cars.The story of how Cuba came to be trapped in automotive time is a fascinating one. For decades, the island country had enjoyed healthy tourism trade and American outpost status, and by the 1950s it had the highest per capita automotive purchasing of any Latin American country - its middle class ensured an interesting variety of vehicles plying the roads. But when Cuba fell to communist rebels in 1959, so ended the inflow of new cars. Since then, trade embargo forced Cuba's car enthusiasts to develop a unique and insular culture, one marked by great creativity, such as:Keeping a car alive with no opportunity to acquire replacement partsCustomizing a car with no access to aftermarket partsDrag racing with no drag stripIn many ways, Cuba is an automotive time warp, where the newest car is a 1959 Chevy or perhaps one of the Soviet Ladas. Cuba's Car Culture offers an inside look at a unique car culture, populated...