Our Man in Havana; Who investigates whether Cuba really is packed with '59 Cadillac convertibles.

Coming out of the tiny aeropuerto varadero one hour east of havana, the first cars we see are thoroughly unremarkable: battered Soviet-era Ladas and Moskovitches; brand-new Fiat Punto and Citroen Xsara rental cars from the countries that don't honor anybody's trade embargo; and utterly plain Eurodiesel buses spewing shovelfuls of particulate matter as they wait to haul Canadian tourists to sanitized resorts a few kilometers up the beach. These are the cars of Cuba? Where are the '59 Cadillacs? The Packards? The Studebaker Hawks? This is more like a boring central European parking garage. Then we see one. Coming around the front of our own modern tourist bus, shadowy and silent like a long metal ghost, all bulbous fenders, high arcing roofline and dulled chrome, slid some sort of sad mid-'50s Chevy or Oldsmobile, rolling through the dimly lit parking lot. Even in the faded light we see it had long since been put on mechanical life support. It turns west to chase its aging, decrepit brothers down the Soviet-built highway and into Old Havana where it will rest for the night on a side street straight out of Pirates of the Caribbean. That sight stopped us in our tracks and made us watch in silent awe. Not because of the car itself; by collector standards in the United States it was pitiful. We stared at it because the car said so much about Cuba's history and about the history of this island. It spoke volumes about the glory and corruption of the old Cuba, of gangsters and high-rolling Americans buying up culture and gambling away profits, of the power once wielded by American carmakers that long ago were the standard of the world. And even more, it spoke of more than four decades of Cold War isolation that wouldn't allow this aging warrior to retire and die the way so many of its assembly-line cousins up north had done years and years before. This is Cuba, comrade, and Cuba is like no other place on Earth. True, we had come here for the cars, because Cuba is an automotive time machine. In this rolling museum the only endowments are ingenuity, and the remarkable ability of very poor people with absolutely no spare parts to keep mechanical behemoths running way, way past their expiration dates. The cars here are road-going versions of the Mir space station, only they aren't going to be jettisoned out of orbit anytime soon. The cars are only the most obvious symptom of the socialism/communism that has choked this island for 42 years, and of the foreign slapping-around Cuba has suffered for about the last 500. Just because the Cubans are now being slapped around by one of their own doesn't make life easier. Yes, we came to see the cars, but we would leave with an indelible lesson on the failure of repression. Christopher columbus dropped anchor near gibrara, Cuba, on his first voyage in 1492 and called the Cubans, ``the best people in the world.'' Then, two decades later, the first boatload of Spanish settlers hit the beach. When 3000 native Tiano Indians came to meet the boat ``with victuals and delicate cheere,'' according to a priest named Bartolome de las Casas who witnessed it, the Spaniards killed all of them, ``without any cause whatsoever.'' Things got worse from there. When the Spanish had killed off or worked to death most of the remaining Indians, they turned to West Africa and began importing slaves. The average life span of a slave upon hitting Cuba was seven years. Even when the Cubans finally overthrew Spanish rule in 1898 (with some much-publicized help from the United States), Spanish oppression was replaced by a succession of mostly corrupt presidentes who were all too happy to siphon Cuba's meager wealth off to U.S. interests in exchange for a fat share for themselves. By the time Gen. Fulgencio Batista was run off the island by a young lawyer-turned-revolutionary named Fidel Castro on New Year's Eve 1958, the Cuban people were ready for a change. But to avoid further U.S. dominance of internal Cuban affairs, Castro turned to the Soviets for support. Which drove U.S. President and major Cold Warrior John F. Kennedy to break diplomatic ties. And that's where we come in. One of the things Cubans couldn't get after the U.S. embargo was any more of those nifty, tailfinned American cars. They couldn't get too many miserable Soviet Ladas, either, though they got enough to keep them going for a few decades until the Soviet Union collapsed. Now, what they have to do to keep their remaining cars (and their refrigerators and air conditioners and TV sets) running, with no spare parts on the horizon, makes for a pretty interesting story. to help tell it, we signed on with a company called Sport Tours International in Milwaukee (www.sporttours.net). Sport Tours' president, Lee Fredericks, had been to Cuba three times, the first two organizing trips to basketball tournaments, which is what his company does, and the third with the idea for this tour. ``Even though I'm not a car guy, the most interesting thing there was the cars. The cars were astounding to me,'' said Fredericks. ``You kind of OD on it. In the world there aren't that many opportunities to see something that is this fascinating.'' Nineteen people made the first trip, equally divided between Sport Tours employees and adventurous retirees, and there was not a whiner among us. Fredericks enlisted the help of the Deposito del Automovil Museo de la Ciudad, or Havana Auto Museum. During our first three days' stay in Varadero, we saw presentations by Cubans who were members of the museum's auto club, and who each owned beautifully preserved old cars. Fredericks also hired two Cuban students to translate for we yanquis. The cars in the club were in the best shape of any we saw on the island all week, and would have made respectable entries in a local car club's showing on a Sunday afternoon in a Milwaukee suburb. We Americans may have a preconceived notion that Cuba is jampacked with nothing but '59 Cadillac convertibles and stunning Packard Caribbeans. This is not true. The '50s American iron makes up less than one quarter of the total cars you'll see on any given city street. One day, hanging out on Havana's seaside drive, the Malecon, we took about a minute to write down every vehicle that went past. It was an unimpressive list: Toyota Yaris, Lada sedan, Ssangyong SUV, Hyundai bus, Nissan Micra, Suzuki Vitara, Fiat 125, Mercedes E220 taxi, GMC school bus, '57 Studebaker, Citroen Xsara rental car, '52 Dodge sedan, Hyundai Atos, Econoline van, another E-Class taxi, '61 Skoda, ratty Moskovitch, '51 Plymouth, new Peugeot 309, '37 Chevrolet. By then our wrist hurt. Most of the old American cars sell for between $1,000 and $3,000 (U.S. dollars), which is a lot of money for a Cuban person, who averages $15 a month official salary. The way they pay for them, of course, is by accumulating more than their official salary and wheeling a few deals. Every Cuban we spoke with had at least two jobs, and all bartered for what they really needed. The economy runs not so much on a black market as on a parallel market. Cars fit into the parallel market. The classic car club made its presentations each morning in a parking lot of our hotel. They started with an exceptionally old car by Cuban standards. ``This car is part of my family,'' said Francisco ``Paco'' Rodriguez of his 1925 Chevrolet Model K, his daily driver. ``My father bought it when I was five years old.'' Or he bought what was left of it. The car was literally full of chickens. ``The chickens at that place loved that car,'' said Rodriguez. His father found the doors in a nearby field. They took it all home and Rodriguez's father and his brothers, all mechanics, fixed what they could and made up the rest ``from memory.'' For instance, a photo of an original Model K was all they had to build a wooden buck on which to hammer out the two front fenders the car now sports. The steering wheel is made out of buffalo wood and had to be slowly bent into shape under water. It spent two years being formed around a mold held under water in a swamp, while the Rodriguez boys worked on the rest of the car Herberto Navarro Galas' grandfather ...