CARISTAS

  Here's another hauler for Robb Mariani and his American Trucker crew to inspect when they get to Cuba . This bruiser, advertised on Revolico.com, is a 1952 Diamond T dump truck.   Built in Chicago, the Diamond T was known as "the Cadillac of trucks."  These days, of course, Cadillac makes its own trucks, or at least sport-utilities, but it was strictly a passenger car producer throughout the Diamond T's 62-year run.   Diamond T also started as a carbuilder. C.A. Tilt, son of a successful shoe manufacturer, founded the Diamond T Motor Car Co. in 1905 to make four-cylinder roadsters. In 1911, after assembling a truck at the request of a customer who owned a plumbing supply company, Tilt decided that commercial vehicles represented a better opportunity and shifted his production exclusively to trucks. Tilt's enterprise would become one of the largest independent truck builders in the United States, turning out some 250,000 vehicles over more than five decades....

    MY DREAM episode of American Trucker takes irrepressible host Robb Mariani to Cuba, where he can exclaim over the island's wondrous collection of old and new haulers.     Not likely, I know.     Cuba might be OK with it (with Cuba, you never know), but the Speed specialty channel  —  corporate cousin to Fox News  —  and its advertisers would almost certainly have, shall we say, concerns. Mariani, a guy who wears the American flag on his sleeve, might hold his own objections to setting a show in a country that has been at odds with the United States longer than the majority of Americans and Cubans have been alive.     But I think his passion for trucks, and his desire to tell the stories of trucks and truckers and their too-often-unsung contributions to our world, would override any political considerations. And let's remember that he recently took viewers to Mexico, which, while not Cuba, is...

    Hino Motors had its beginnings in Tokyo Gas and Electric, which produced its first vehicle, the "A-Type" truck, in 1917. Hino emerged as a separate company in 1942 to make military vehicles, and after the Second World War turned its focus to diesel engines, trucks and buses.      Today controlled by Toyota, Hino is Japan's largest truck-builder. But it has also at times produced cars, including Renault 4CVs built under licence in the 1950s and its own sweet-looking Contessa in 1961.      It has used many versions of its winged logo through the years, as can be seen from these images from Hino's website . Sadly, the wings now are history, replaced by an unremarkable stylized H that appears patterned on Toyota's oval  emblem.    I'm guessing that the huge Hino wings so proudly displayed on many Cuban trucks today arrived in the 1970s and '80s on buses imported by the island for intercity routes. Adrián L...