9.2.17

Cuba's Curious Car Culture

End of a Cycle!?
      The photo above was used this week to highlight an article by British journalist Ashley Coates on the Independent.co.uk website. The article's headline asked this question: "Is This the End of the Road for Cuba's Classic Cars." The insightful answers were indeed interesting, revealing, historical and topical.
         Back in the 1950s during the U.S.-backed Batista-Mafia dictatorship, rich Batistiano and Mafiosi figures imported over 125,000 of Detroit's newest, biggest, most expensive and finest autos to the island. On January 1, 1959 when the Batista-Mafia dictatorship fled the charging Cuban Revolution, what was left of the ill-gotten loot also fled the island to hook up with the Cuban-fleeced loot already sent to secretive accounts abroad or to Mafia-connected banks in U. S. cities such as Miami and Newark. But those big fancy cars were among the items left behind on the island. In the decades since 1959 in Revolutionary Cuba, the ingenuity of the Cuban mechanics in keeping those cars running decade after decade has thrilled the world, including historians who are aware that for decades the U. S. embargo and other regime-change schemes have prevented those mechanics from getting the spare parts those cars needed.
       Back in the 1950s, American businessmen, Batistiano thugs and Mafiosi kingpins {including Lucky Luciano, Meyer Lansky and Santo Trafficante Jr.} were squired around Havana in expensive gas-guzzlers like the yellow behemoth depicted above, which is now utilized by an enterprising Cuban taxi-driver.
       But the Ashley Coates article points out that Havana streets and roads now reflect the efforts made by U. S. President Barack Obama to normalize relations with Cuba, bucking the decades-old trend since 1959 of allowing revengeful and still greedy remnants of the Batista dictatorship to dictate U. S. laws related to Cuba. The above photo shows a brand-new Infiniti on a street in Havana, courtesy of President Obama's legacy. While a handful of counter-revolutionary Cuban-Americans in Miami and in Congress still dictate most of America's Cuban narratives and policies, Obama paved the way for the majority will of Americans and Cuban-Americans to at least have a voice in the quagmire of Cuban relations. Ashley Coates, for example, explains that a Cuban-American named Alfonso Albaisa is a top executive at Infiniti and, like most Cuban-born businessmen including those in Miami, Mr. Albaisa wants to do business with Cuba and has no desire to wage economic and physical wars against Cubans on the island for another half-century or so. 
         And that's why the brand-new Infiniti was spotted driving around Havana, that's why Cubans in Cuba should make Cuban decisions, and that's precisely why Ashley Coates ended the article with this sentence:
                      "The Obama Thaw may yet be stalled by the new Trump administration in the United States, but in the meantime Cubans are braced for at least a degree of change on their roads and streets." This concluding sentence, of course, is a reminder that...in a saner and more decent world...Cubans on the island and less greedy, less revengeful, and much more democratic Cubans in the United States would and should finally agree that Cubans actually living in Cuba should be allowed to chart their own roads, streets, and lives.
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