| Che's Chevrolet, Fidel's Oldsmobile: On the Road in Cuba | 
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Sales Rank: 1033530
Category: Book
Author: Richard Schweid
Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
Studio: The University of North Carolina Press
Manufacturer: The University of North Carolina Press
Label: The University of North Carolina Press
Languages: English (Original Language), English (Unknown), English (Published)
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 262
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1
Dimensions (in): 8 x 6.1 x 0.9
ISBN: 0807828920
Dewey Decimal Number: 388.32097291
EAN: 9780807828922
ASIN: 0807828920
Publication Date: September 29, 2004
Release Date: September 3, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
Vintage U.S.-made cars on the streets of Havana provide a common representation of Cuba. Journalist Richard Schweid, who traveled throughout the island to research the story of motor vehicles in Cuba today and yesterday, gets behind the wheel and behind the stereotype in this colorful chronicle of cars, buses, and trucks. In his captivating, sometimes gritty, voice, Schweid blends previously untapped historical sources with his personal experiences, spinning a car-centered history of life on the island over the past century.Packard, Studebaker, Edsel, De Soto: cars long extinct in the United States can be seen at work every day on Cuba's streets. Havana and Santiago de Cuba today are home to some 60,000 North American cars, all dating back to at least 1959, the year the Cuban Revolution prevailed. Though hardly a new part has arrived in Cuba since 1960, the cars are still on the road, held together with mechanical ingenuity and willpower. Visiting car mechanics, tracking down records in dusty archives, and talking with car-crazy Cubans of all types, Schweid juxtaposes historic moments (Fidel Castro riding to the Bay of Pigs in an Oldsmobile) with the quotidian (a weary mother's two-cent bus ride home after a long day) and composes a rich, engaging picture of the Cuban people and their history. The narrative is complemented by fifty-two historic black-and-white photographs and eight color photographs by contemporary Cuban photographer Adalberto Roque.
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The Pictures Present History of Cuban Life in the Fifties. December 3, 2005
1 out of 4 found this review helpful
This is a history of Cuba replete with fifty-two old photographs, called 'historic', with emphasis on its dependence on America's automobiles. "Following the Revolution, [when Castro took over], relations between the United States and Cuba went from bad to worse." America was the major exporter of the sugar, with U.S. based oil companies plentiful in Havana, only ninety miles from Key West Florida.
In February, 1960, Cuba made a major mistake by agreeing to sell "five million tons of sugar over a five year period to the Soviet Union." This was during the Cold War. "In March, President Dwight Eisenhower responded...by drastically reducing American purchases of Cuban sugar. In June, when the first shipment of Soviet crude [oil] arrived, Shell, Standard, and Texaco refused to refine it at their Cuban installations. As a result, Castro's Revolutionary government took them over and 'nationalized' them. In 1959, the president of Airtex, a Chicago-based manufacturer of fuel and water pumps, wrote a Christmas letter to the company's Cuban dealers, "We really admire the work that is being done by your maximum leader, Fidel Castro." He was wrong. By that fall, Castro had put severe restrictions on the import and sale of North American cars.
From 1950 to 1958, the number of cars on the island had jumped from 70,000 to 167,000. At the same time, a large majority of Cubans were illiterate and too poor to afford minimal health care. The tourist trade was booming, and "the island had the largest per capita sales of Cadillacs in the world." In Havana, Chevrolets dominated sales. Tourism was off dramaticallly during the first year of the Revolution. One shipment of 1960 Oldsmobiles left Detroit in 1959, and a few 1960 Chevrolets. Che claimed one of the latter, though he is shown driving a Studebaker on the day he married in 1953. Fords were also plentiful in 1956 with Plymouths and Valiants never reaching Cuban shores.
The first car in Cuba arrived in 1902. The last trolley ran in 1952 replaced by buses. "By 1930, some were calling for the city to eliminate trolley service entirely." They used a type of trolley (pictured) with spoked wheels and "to make a trip in a trolley from one end of the capital to the other means to have to submit oneself to a truly distressing torture." The Astro bus station was a center of "community interaction, an urban hub where people come to eat, drink, or shop as well as to catch a bus to some other place to to wait for somebody arriving on one." I guess when the KAT transit center is built here, it will resemble the one they had in 1953. Some of our current buses are as torturous to ride as their old trolleys.
During the Thirties, the Ford V-8 and Lincoln were popular in Cuba and, in the Forties, the Packard for the wealthy. The color photos don't add anything to the historic collection as they show history in the making. Written by a Nashville native (I wonder if he knew Bernie Schweid who I would see occasionally on Nashville local television shows?) who settled in Barcelona, Spain, he compares Cuban revelry to the nightlife in Spain where "everyone likes to go out and meet their friends for a drink in the evenings." I have a 1958 glossy 8x10 of my extremely handsome friend, Carlos Ubach, doing just that in Barcelona.
Other books by Richard Schweid include BARCELONA: AN OLYMPIC SEASON, THE COCKROACH PAPERS and CONFEDERATE CATFISH FISHING IN THE MISSISSIPPI DELTA. He is senior editor of the city magazine, 'Barcelona Metropolitan' and produced an Oscar-nominated film 'Balseros,' about Cuba -- a place which clearly fascinates him, as this book shows.
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