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S-1554UC
Price: $34.95
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Cuba’s Car
Culture: Celebrating the Island's Automotive
Love Affair
by Tom Cotter
Welcome to Cuba's automotive time capsule, filled with
classic cars. The story of how Cuba came to be trapped in automotive
time is a fascinating one. For decades, the island country had
enjoyed healthy tourism trade and American outpost status, and by
the 1950s it had the highest per capita automotive purchasing of any
Latin American country. But when Cuba fell to communist rebels in
1959, so ended the inflow of new cars. Since then, trade embargo
forced Cuba's car enthusiasts to develop a unique and insular
culture, one marked by great creativity, such as:
-
Keeping a car alive with no opportunity to acquire
replacement parts
- Customizing a car with no
access to aftermarket parts
- Drag
racing with no drag strip
In many ways,
Cuba is in an automotive time warp, where the newest car is a 1959
Chevy or perhaps one of the Soviet Ladas. Cuba's Car Culture offers
an inside look at a unique car culture, populated with cars that
have been cut off from the world so long that they've morphed into
something else in the spirit of automotive survival. Authors Tom
Cotter and Bill Warner (founder of the Amelia Island Concours) take
readers of Cuba's Car Culture on a whirlwind tour of all things
automotive, beginning with Cuba's pre-Castro car and racing history
and bringing us up to today's lost collector cars, street racing,
and the challenges of keeping decades-old cars on the road. The book
is illustrated throughout with rare historical photos as well as
contemporary photos of Cuba's current car scene. For anyone who
enjoys classic cars, from old Chevy Bel-Airs to Studebakers to Ford
Fairlanes, a cruise around Cuba will make you feel like a kid in a
candy store.
Hard cover, 192 pages, 160 color & 38 B&W
photos.
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