In looking at pictures of the funeral, it looks like “The Dear Leader’s” last ride was on a US-made hearse.
How is this possible? (The US had no trade with N. Korea since 1950).
Plus, why would the little shit choose to ride in a vehicle made by his archenemy?
Or was it a Russian ZIL? (I recall that the ZILs looked a lot like Lincolns).
Um, last-generation ZIL looked like this, which would make it look a lot like… maybe a mid-80s Lincoln Town Car:
Take a look at this pic from the funeral:
http://ca.ibtimes.com/articles/273807/20111228/kim-jong-il-s-funeral-procession-pyongyang.htm
Zoom in on the hood ornament of that car. It’s clearly the Lincoln logo. No such logo was seen on the ZIL.
I’m sure we could pin down the approximate model year of the Lincoln Town Car in question if we were bored enough.
As to your actual OP… they smuggled it in illegally, or it went through an intermediary country through what would count as the grey market. Clearly, no Lincoln dealers
there…
On edit:
And, not actually a hearse. In those, you have a station wagon style body, with the casket and evil dictator in the back.
This evil dictator’s casket rode on top of the roof of this lengthy limousine, on top of what looks like the world’s largest doily.
He had expensive tastes, and that included some goods made in the US. Even if there’s no direct trade, you can get American goods through China or Russia. It’s not all that hard. And, as you mentioned, it might not actually be a Lincoln. Apparently, his successor is a fan of the NBA.
Also, he didn’t really consider the US his ‘archenemy’. Just another political adversary, albeit a powerful one. Even towards the end of the cold war, there was a fair amount of trade in the USSR in dollars and with western goods. Much of it on the black market, of course. You buy the good stuff, no matter where it comes from.
You think there aren’t Americans who’d smoke a Cuban cigar if given the chance?
It’s Kim Jong-Il, BTW.
They could have got it via Cuba. Lots of old American iron there, including (presumably) a few Lincolns.
There would be no need to go to Cuba. It’s easy enough for NK to get anything they need from China next door, if they’re willing to pay for it.
It’s newer than anything the Cubans would have. The revolution there was in '59.
The fine details don’t match well:
-ZIL has horizontal bars on the grille; funeral hearse has vertical
-Bumper detail much different
-Orange turn lights on ZIL, with no vertical chrome trim above
-ZIL has rounder wheel openings with no trim
-ZIL has no hood “center crease”
Grille has 6 vertical partitions in the video, none in the JPEGs at the ZiL site.
The text beneath your video reads:
*The funeral cortege, on Wednesday, consisted of Lincoln Continentals from the nineteen-seventies, an element that, as the Times notes, caused some excitement among auto enthusiasts. It is a measure of the North’s isolation that the irony of an American car carrying Kim was, the paper writes, likely lost on Koreans.)
All I could think of upon looking at the picture of the car with the large picture on top was.
I don’t even want to think about what is going to happen to the people who mounted that on there, or their families, should that thing break loose or get blown off during the procession.
It looks like a '76 Lincoln Town Car. Here is one with the headlight doors open, a common thing since they’re vacuum operated and once the vacuum bleeds down, they automatically open.
The side mirrors have been changed, along with chrome trim on the headlight doors and along the fenders.
LOL, guess I missed that 
I suppose the ZIL could be based on the Lincoln ? The Soviets were not above reverse engineering US goods.
I wonder why they used a US car though? More details here, but no real answer (other than that was used for his father’s funeral in 1994).
[minor hijack]FWIW, although I love fine cigars, I won’t smoke Cuban cigars. Living as close to Mexico (where Cuban cigars are legal) as I do, it would be very easy to get Cuban cigars. However, I will not smoke Cuban cigars and have asked my friends not to tell me if they have or are smoking one.[/m.h.]
Abraham Lincoln and Kim Jong-Il. Boy, that’s about as politically-poles-apart as you’re ever going to get.
One of them had the wisdom to leave the foreign country to his south alone…
Because it’s the same car that was used in the funeral of his father.
That’s true. Lincoln never took any aggressive action against Mexico.
Really? Which one?
Interesting take on the (apparently) Lincoln hearse here.
You are correct. My sources are saying it was a circa '70s Lincoln.