Havana’s old cars

The dashboard of our Impala taxi. All photos by David Lansing.

I’m not a car guy at all. In fact, if I lived somewhere like NYC or San Francisco where you can actually get away without owning a car, I would. But the cars in Havana are special. They aren’t the sort of tricked out vintage automobiles you’ll see at a typical car show where the emphasis is on original equipment. In Cuba, nobody cares whether the car is made up of the original components; they only care that it runs.

Whenever we rent some car that is 50 or 60 years old, the first thing we ask the driver is if most of the parts are original. We don’t ask him that because we care. We ask him that because all Cubans take great pride in showing you how they have cleverly converted parts from different makes and models to keep a car running that, in the States, would long ago have gone to the junkyard. For instance, yesterday we rented this old Chevy Impala to tool around in. The driver told us that the speedometer was from an old BMW, the radio originally resided in a Russian Volga, and there were other parts from a ’57 Chevy and a Japanese pick-up truck. Very cool.

So I thought today I’d just present a gallery of some of the old cars of Havana I shot the past couple of days. God only knows how many miles they have on them (the Impala driver told us that his car had well over 300,000 miles on it) or where the parts came from, but they all have on thing in common: They work.

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