![]() ![]() “People seem to think that the automotive auction houses will go down to Cuba and scoop up all these old cars,” says Brenda Priddy, an automotive photographer from Arizona who has taken advantage of Cuba’s cultural exchange program to lead two car-focused tours there.īut the well-worn cars, many with Japanese diesel engines, are alluring only in photographs, Priddy warns: “Most of the cars there are not the ones anyone would want to bring back to the US.” Now, the end of the US embargo may mean that Cubans have a chance to make more money and buy new cars – leaving auto enthusiasts salivating at the idea of the vintage beauties that may be for sale on the tropical island. I see Cuba as the world's biggest car show. But extremely high prices – $30,000 for a Chinese Geely, $70,000 for a Volkswagen and $250,000 for a new Peugeot, for example – have kept the flow of new vehicles to a trickle. Despite the island’s poverty, its roads have the swagger of big, tailfinned Chevrolets, Fords, Studebakers and Chryslers echoing a bygone era of American dollar-fueled prosperity.Ĭuba relaxed some of its own trade restrictions on automobiles earlier in the year, allowing new cars to be sold on the island for the first time in half a century. ![]() Today, the images of an isolated Cuba that reach the outside world often feature battered but brightly painted American cars that arrived on the island before Fidel Castro’s Communist regime took control of its government in 1959. ![]()
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