La Havane

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A City Where the Cars Stopped in 1960 and the Clocks Never Did

There are roughly 60,000 pre-1960 American cars still on the road in Cuba, nearly all privately owned. Cubans call them almendrones — big almonds.

For context: in 1956 there were about 143,000 cars on Cuban roads, 95,000 of them in Havana alone. The United States was the primary supplier. The most significant American restrictions on car and parts imports began in 1960, and in February 1962 Kennedy declared a full trade blockade.

The supply stopped overnight. Roughly two-thirds of that pre-revolution fleet is still running, sixty-five years later.

It runs because Cuban mechanics stopped treating the cars as American. A 1950s Chevrolet with a Soviet engine is unremarkable. Cars have been converted from V8 petrol to diesel, fitted with disc brakes scavenged from Ladas, and repaired with parts machined from scratch. Only about 5–10% of the surviving classics have been kept original.

A 2010 law prevents foreigners from exporting them, so the fleet stays. Old Soviet cars sell from around $10,000; American ones from $30,000 to $100,000.

The clock: so the cars have not changed since 1960. The clocks have changed constantly.

Cuba sits at about 21°30′ north, which is unusually close to the equator for a country that bothers with daylight saving. It bothers anyway. According to one count, Cuba has introduced daylight saving five separate times since 1928 — in 1928, 1940–42, 1945–46, 1965–2004, and 2007 to the present. The stated reason is always the same: electricity, and specifically the artificial light used for cooking at peak hours.

And then there is the gap in that list.

In 2004 Cuba went onto daylight saving time and stayed there. Not for a season. For two years. The country remained in a permanent state of summer time until 29 October 2006, when it decided to re-establish standard time.

One more oddity: the Guantánamo Bay naval base observes daylight saving in synchronisation with its headquarters in Florida, regardless of what the rest of the island is doing.

Cars frozen at 1960. A clock that has been picked up and put down five times in a century, and once left running for two years by omission.

Ensoleillement annuel