Cuba is a once-glamorous stage-set now patinated by age. The visitors’ first reaction is of being caught in an eerie 1950s time warp. High-finned, voluptuous dowagers from the heyday of Detroit are everywhere: chrome-laden DeSotos, corpulent Buicks, stylish Plymouth Furies and other relics of ’50s ostentation, when American cars reflected the Hollywood Zeitgeist for excessive wealth, fantasy, gaudiness and sex with which Havana was at that time synonymous.

The tail fins of chrome-polished ’57 Packards glint beneath the floodlit mango trees of nightclubs such as the Tropicana, the open-air extravaganza now in its seventh decade of stiletto-heeled paganism. Nearby, perhaps, sits a 1958 Studebaker Silver Hawk, ’57 Chevrolet Bel Air convertible, or a Dodge Custom Royal from the same year inviting foreigners to admire the grillwork or run their fingers along a pointed tail fin. Even the humble station wagons are there: the Chevy Nomads and Pontiac Safaris, and the woodie wagons. "Was this a movie set or a real city?" wrote Tom Miller, in his book Trading With The Enemy, "Cars missing from American highways for decades lined every block."

American cars had flooded Cuba for fifty years culminating in the Batista era, when no other country in the world imported as many Chryslers and Studebakers and DeSotos. Then Castro & Co. made a revolution and spun off into Soviet orbit, invoking the U.S. trade embargo that in terms of American automobiles has cast a time-warp spell over Cuba.

Cuba is by far the largest American car museum in the world. And what settings these cacharros enjoy! Diamond-dust beaches and bathtub-warm seas the colors of peacock feathers; bottle-green mountains and jade valleys full of dramatic formations; and ancient cities containing perhaps the finest collection of Spanish colonial buildings in all the Americas.

Today, Cuba possesses about 450,000 cars, of which perhaps one-sixth are pre-revolutionary American autos dating back to the ’20s and ’30s. In certain areas, one rarely sees a vehicle that is not a venerable, usual decrepit, cacharro. Most are Fifties yanqui classics evoking nostalgia like Elvis Presley songs of the same era.

Buick or alternative wheels

One occasionally spots a shining example of museum quality. The majority, though, have long ago been touched up with housepaint. Many, in this era of gasoline shortage, have simply been left curbside to rust away in the tropical heat and rain. These yanqui anachronisms get written off, however, only as an absolute last resort: in contemporary Cuba nothing gets thrown away lightly. Instead, most are cherished and cared for like elderly family members, however infirm. It’s not unusual to find a beloved cacharro parked in the living room, the garage wall divide having been knocked down so that the car really does live.

Few if any cars are 100% original. Historic preservation according to internationally recognized standards is a luxury that has no relevance to Cuban reality. Many attempt it nonetheless, defying the odds against hardships their North American counterparts can’t even imagine. Ay, the lengths their owners have to go to in order just to keep them running! Cubans are magicians. Geniuses of eclectic invention. Tender affection and sheer ingenuity keeps the Eisenhower-era cars rolling.

"We go through Hell," Luis San Fiel told me, as he wrestled a disk brake from a Soviet Lada onto the wheel of his 1929 Model A Ford. "Keeping a car running here in Cuba isn’t easy."

For a start, finding parts is infinitely more difficult than in the United States. Importing U.S. auto parts (or most anything else from the States, for that matter) is illegal, thanks to the trade embargo that still hangs like an axe over Cuba. Even if they could, most Cubans don’t have the money to pay for such parts. The luckiest motorists have foreign family and friends who bring them piston rings and other spare parts. Most Cubans rely on each other, lending one another spare tires, spark plugs, and precious batteries. Abandoned cars are thoroughly scavenged and picked clean until only the rusting skeleton remains.

It’s a tribute both to 1940s and ’50s Detroit, and to Cuban ingenuity, that cars from the classic age still bravely soldier on, exceeding their design life by decades. Lacking proper tools and replacement parts, Cubans adeptly cajole one more kilometer out of their battered hulks. Their intestinally reconstituted engines are monuments to mechanical wizardry. Carburetors are held together with homemade nuts and bolts; vital organs are replaced with parts cannibalized off other cars. Beneath their rounded hoods rattle Soviet crankshafts, Polish pistons, and Czech carburetors.

Chevy at Villa Clara

The most impossible conjugations will leave you amazed. I once took a ride in a 1950 Cadillac Series 62 sedan, silver-painted with dulled chrome, riding silently on its coil-leaf springs like a long metal ghost. The original overhead-valved 331-cid V-8 engine delivered 160 bhp and was acclaimed by Cadillac as "the greatest automotive power plant ever built." Nonetheless, we labored along like a Sherman tank, pumping out a bilious black cloud behind.

"Original?" I asked sceptically. "No!" the driver replied, shaking his head as if loathe to admit it. "Ruso... del tractor."  A Russian tractor engine! The transmission, he said, was from a Volga sedan. My jaw dropped in astonishment. How on earth had he managed to Houdini the tractor motor onto the Cadillac engine mounts and then get the Volga driveshaft to meet?

"No estaba fácil," he replied. It wasn’t easy. Like everything in Cuba, you find a way. Almost every Cuban is mechanically savvy. Repairs are performed alfresco, in the street or wherever a car happens to fizzle and die. When a car breaks down, forget tow trucks. They don’t exist. And there’s no AAA. You jack up the car and crawl under with your feet sticking out in traffic like those of a duck.

As with everything on the island, most Cuban car owners rely on their wits. They’re mechanical artistes. Masters of making the best of a bad situation. Tales are legendary of parts being conjured from the most unlikely objects. You hear stories of tin cans reshaped as pistons or, more believably, enema tubes being stolen from hospitals for use as fuel lines. Even hydraulic fluids get manufactured at home in the bathroom or kitchen sink. Chrome is a particular problem. Cuba’s Cuchilla de Moa mountains are fraught with precious metals, including chromium, whose extraction forms the linchpin of the local economy of Holguín province. Yet for Cuba’s car owners, not even an ounce of chrome can be found. Nor even a can of rust cleaner. And certainly not a rear chrome taillight housing for Eugenio O’Hallorans’ ’59 Cadillac Fleetwood, a model renowned for its un-Cadillac propensity for rust. No worries. The spry 77-year-old makes his own. Known as el majo de la hojalata ("the wizard of tinplate"), O’Hallorans is one of those mecánicos particulares whose name is revered island-wide. His workshop in the colonial-era village of Santiago de las Vegas, about 15 miles southwest of Havana, draws a steady stream of prospective clients seeking embellecedores de latón (literally, "tin embellishments") to replace rusting trim.

I watched, fascinated, as one of O’Hallorans’ employees marked a flat piece of tin with score lines that exactly recreated a desired fifties pattern. The worker then slid the tin plate between a mangle with two beveled disc-shaped rollers that he tightened by means of a screw to form a vice. The tin was then drawn by hand through the opposing rollers, following the score lines to produce the required grooves. Next he ’wrapped’ the metal around a rod of solid metal to form a tube. This he handed to another worker who donned a welder’s mask then soldered a barely noticeable seal. The tube was then buffed to a high sheen and hey presto! I was handed a tailpipe for a 1951 Ford Crestliner Tudor, perfect in every detail.

Not surprisingly, American classics wheeze along without proper tune-ups, coughing out thick clouds of smoke while their large engines guzzle precious gas at an astonishing rate. Emission controls don’t exist in Cuba. But things are changing. Until recently, vehicle inspections consisted of a visual once over by representatives — called ’blue jackets’ for the color of their uniforms — of the vehicle inspection agency. Since 2001, a new law requires that all vehicles now undergo computerized testing. To date, about 50 percent of cacharros have failed the test, administered by a sophisticated French-made instrument that Cubans have nicknamed the somatón: the "hard blow" or "beating."

Alas, the tests threaten to finally sweep many legendary pieces of Detroit iron from the road. For many owners, that’s bad news in more ways than one. Museum-quality cacharros are hired out for weddings and fiestas de quince, the traditional celebration to honor a Cuban girl’s fifteenth birthday. Lesser-quality jalopies do duty as colectivos — shared taxis that carry Cubans for pesos. The workhorses of the taxi system, these shared cabs run along fixed routes, much like buses, and charge 10 or 50 pesos for a ride anywhere along the route. Havana’s fleet of ad-hoc taxis congregate around Parque de la Fraternidad, a veritable auto museum of vintage Americana. The cars don’t move until they’re full. Packed to the gills, they lumber off on well-worn, sagging tires amid a crunching of worn gears and backfiring from weary exhausts.

Chevy in Trinidad

One day, I hailed a colectivo and in I hopped, sharing the back seat with an old woman and a young boy. For 35 pesos, I got to cruise down the tree-shaded boulevard in a baby pink 1950 Cadillac Series 75 taxi while the three of us slid around on the slick, vinyl-covered bench seat to the rhythm of the rhumba on the radio.

In Driving Through Cuba, author Carlo Gébler drives around the island in quest of a ’57 Cadillac Eldorado Brougham; a super-deluxe pillarless sedan with a brushed aluminum roof, two front-end protuberances known as "Dagmar" bumpers, and "a rear end that would’ve received an X-rating had it been a movie." Alas, the most sumptuous American car ever made proved elusive. Not surprisingly, for only 704 Broughams were produced. But you can bet there’s at least one to be found on the island. After all, in the 1950s, Havana bought more Cadillacs than any other city in the world. Reason enough to visit.

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