When Fidel Castro came to power in 1959, he made it illegal for anyone to import cars without government permission. The mandate arrested automotive history on the island, and curvaceous midcentury Chevys, Studebakers, and Buicks still rumble down Havana's Malecón much as they did several decades ago. Now, with the easing of relations between the U.S. and Cuba, some of the nearly 60,000 vintage cars in Cuba could eventually make their way into collectors’ hands stateside.
Cuba loosened some of its own trade restrictions on automobiles earlier this year, allowing new cars to be bought and sold on the island. Lifting the U.S. trade embargo on the island—a decision made by Congress, not President Barack Obama—would let Cuba's classic automobiles return to the U.S. after half a century. If that does happen, buyers won’t be traditional car collectors, who prize low mileage and automobiles in pristine original condition. Not to mention that Castro’s restriction on auto imports also stopped the flow of their replacement parts. So although a Cadillac convertible in Cuba may look authentic at first blush, a closer look reveals hundreds of thousands of miles on the odometer and a bevy of makeshift fixes, perhaps even (gasp!) a Peugeot diesel engine under the hood. That said, experts anticipate a niche market of buyers willing to pay a premium to own a piece of Cuban history.
Photographer: Paul Hahn/LAIF via Redux “Most people would want them as a sort of art piece,” says McKeel Hagerty, CEO of car insurer Hagerty. Even immaculately restored examples of 1950s-era American cars aren't terribly valuable, Hagerty says, but interested buyers should expect to pay two or three times more for the jerry-rigged Cuban examples. His company estimates that a top-of-the-line 1954 Chevrolet 210 Delray club coupé would fetch $20,000, while the Cuban version could command $40,000–$60,000. Similarly, one could pay more than $60,000 for a 1955 Buick Century sedan from Cuba that would ordinarily be valued at $20,600.
Undoubtedly, some Cuban car owners will jump at the chance to make quick cash by offloading their American behemoths, but Hagerty doesn’t expect a flood of cars to leave the island. “These cars are part of their culture,” he says. “They are integral to the image of who they are, so it would be hard to imagine [the cars] all going away.”
Photographer: Stefano Biliotti/Ovoworks via Getty Images For die-hard car collectors, the prospect of an open Cuba holds the intrigue of a rare find—a mothballed, broken-down beauty abandoned by an owner lacking the financial means or ingenuity to fix it. “I’m of the belief that there is something over there to be found,” says Rick Drewry, a collector car claims specialist at American Modern Insurance Group. “Some people are going to be on the hunt for those diamonds in the rough.”
Those mythical diamonds in the rough aren’t old Fords—or any other American-made car—but the Mercedes, Ferraris, and Maseratis that raced in the Cuban Grand Prix. A photographer touring the island recently uncovered a gullwing Mercedes-Benz 300 SL, examples of which fetch over $1 million at auction, rusting under a banana tree. But Hagerty dismisses that discovery as a one-off. “Trust me,” he says, “that is going to be the search. But best I can tell, most of the cars that raced there exited the country around the time of the revolution.”
