CARISTAS

Also spotted at the Mercedes garage, a 1953 Chevrolet Bel Air in anything-but-basic black.

Complete, but for a headlamp bezel.    The owner   of this 1955 Buick Special two-door hardtop works at the Mercedes-Benz heavy-vehicle repair depot in Matanzas. Nicely executed continental kit, and a whip antenna. That's the original big Buick steering wheel.

   WITH 18 days left, the  fundraising campaign for Piotr Degler's  photo book  has attracted  €24,800 in pledges, or roughly 83 per cent of its  € 30,000 target.     Here are more of the images that campaign backers will see in  Carros de Cuba. A '38 Ford peers out from beneath multiple layers of paint. Caught in passing ... Front tire on this Porsche 356 A could use some air. Mercedes 300SL roadster might see the road again someday. Photos © Piotr Degler. Used by permission.

A 1957 DB 2/4 similar to the Aston Martin in Cuba. Wikipedia photo.     THOUGHTFUL AND entertaining, Jonathan Ward's account of his foray to Cuba is a happy change from the usual breathless first-timer's report.    He tells of handing out fuses, bulbs and other auto-repair necessities, and helping to fix a taxi radiator hose with a Band-Aid. He describes the progress and decay he sees side by side.    And he shares a revealing remark by a doctor who moonlights as a tricycle taxi operator about the island's dilemma.    "Communism does not work," the doctor tells him, "but capitalism has no conscience."     Yet when it comes to the rare 1958 Aston Martin DB 2/4 he saw in Cuba, Ward reveals a rookie error.    He fell for The Story.    Everything in Cuba has a story – amusing or romantic or poignant or all of these things. Sometimes it is true. Sometimes it is embroidered from a single thread of fact. Sometime...

          ANOTHER RARE and desirable car has surfaced in Cuba – this one a race-prepared Aston Martin DB 2/4.    And unlike Cuba's infamous, rotted-to-ruins Mercedes Gullwing , the 1958 Aston Martin is said to be salvageable, if only barely.    The source of this assessment is none other than premier U.S. restorer Jonathan Ward, who came across the British hatchback – yes, the DB 2/4 is a hatchback – on his first visit to the island (Ward, like so many Americans, wanting to get to Cuba before all the Americans get to Cuba).    Writing at roadandtrack.com , Ward reports riding in a Chaika M14 taxi to a farm an hour outside Havana, where he was shown the  Aston Martin resting under a blanket of dust in a shed.    "As our eyes adjusted to the dim cavern, we saw the unmistakable buttocks of a British sport car," he relates. "I immediately knew what we were looking at."    Ward, founder of ICON 4x4 ,...

   AT THE VERY back of this body and mechanical shop was the proprietor's own car, a 1957 Chevrolet Bel Air sedan undergoing its own slow restoration. No telling how many times it had been rebuilt before, but it looked clean and straight. The '57 Chevy was available new in several single colours and two-tone  combinations, but white-over-orange wasn't one of them.  Doors have had some patching, but dash and floor look sound. Steering wheel and column are newer than the rest of the car  —    though maybe not by much. No diesel under this hood. Inside the Chevy's neat engine compartment is a 235-cubic-inch six-cylinder gasoline engine. 'Original,' said the owner.

In a garage in the town of Aguacate, huge portions of what appears to be an English Ford are being rebuilt with new metal.    I ALWAYS laugh when I see a TV car restorer in Dallas or Las Vegas open up a project vehicle and complain that it's rustier than expected.    Rust? Here in Canada, we can show you rust.    And in Cuba, too, the chapistas know all about corrosion and its insidious appetite for ferrous metal.    In snowy climes, the liberal spreading of salt on icy roads speeds the electro-chemical process that is rust on any car not tucked away for the winter. In Cuba, where you're never far from the ocean, those same sodium, calcium and magnesium chlorides waft in on the breeze – in smaller quantities, certainly, but just as damaging over the many years of a Cuban car's lifetime.    The TV restorers from Gas Monkey Garage and Count's Kustoms can fix rust, of course. They just don't want to invest the time.    Cu...