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 The Pictures Present History of Cuban Life in the Fifties.
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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