Views of Cuba show 1950s Buicks, Fords, etc. Since they can’t buy American cars, why don’t they just buy VWs, Hyundais, Toyotas, or other non-USA cars?
Other embargo questions: Lifting the embargo will make it easier to send money to Cuba. Can’t an American send money to Cuba via Montreal or Kingston, Jamaica, or Mexico City, or the Cayman Islands?
Cubans are ecstatic about ending the embargo. Who in USA would gain from this? Is Cuba going to return all the property they seized?
Why don’t you buy a Rolls Royce?
No.
[QUOTE=bizerta]
Other embargo questions: Lifting the embargo will make it easier to send money to Cuba. Can’t an American send money to Cuba via Montreal or Kingston, Jamaica, or Mexico City, or the Cayman Islands?
[/QUOTE]
At a guess, because it’s an offence for an American to send more than XX dollars to Cuba; doesn’t matter how it gets there.
Cuba is communist. Why would they want to tolerate something so capitalist as a new car dealership?
Really, the whole idea that the American embargo is the cause of Cuba’s poverty is ridiculous. There’s a whole world outside the US which Cuba could trade with, but mostly doesn’t.
Until very recently, besides most new cars being unaffordable vis-a-vis the income level of most Cubans, regulations and permitting requirements made it administratively virtually impossible to buy, sell or register privately a new-to-the-market (not necessarily new per se) motor vehicle. Even now it’s still unaffordable to the average citizen due to steep markup.
The problem isn’t so much being communist as being one of those places where “egalitarianism” takes the form of chopping the legs of tall people at the knees. The whole system is built around plated-glass ceilings, or maybe “under” would be the right word. Destacar, being different in a way that attracts attention, is punished by police harassment, jail, seizure of your goods or combinations thereof - better keep your hand and head down and have nothing that can be seized.
Additionally, the idea that regularizing relations between the two countries is going to change Cuba. As if exposure to every country in the world BUT the US was not enough. No, it takes exposure to the US and only that US that will open the eyes of Cubans. We can be ridiculously US-centric about things…
Well the Castro boys are running out of clock, perhaps it’s better to entice now with opportunity that may make a similar regime untenable in the future. It’s not like they’ve fostered the cult of personality and hermitage North Korea has.
Actually, when I was in Havana, all the brands that you mentioned were present, including the frankencars
First question is directly related to the second question. As long as Cuba remains a soverign nation, it can thumb its nose at the affected corporations, or come to an accomodation. Regardless if the embargo was magically lifted tommorow, you still need hard currency to buy stuff, thats now magically available.
Which reverts to the first question, who gains is really a matter of seizing the market and I believe that will most likely be the cuban american dispora, bringing goods and cash into the country. The heavy hitters are most probably going to wait out the first few years, to see what way the winds are blowing, regarding property rights and intellectual property rights.
Declan
Don’t the sanctions work far, far more broadly than that?
A long while back I had some reason to understand something about the sanctions and I thought the US had heavy handed measures in place that tried to punish anyone outside the US who dealt with Cuba and wanted to have business with the US.
As in, the US couldn’t prevent a bank or a shipowner from outside the US from dealing with Cuba, but if they did so then they would be prevented from operating in or trading to the US.
Is that not right?
My wife worked in the postal service in Trinidad&Tobago and had a lot of Cuban customers mailing packages of things like electronics to family in Cuba, which caused a headache for her as the Cuban government or postal service would return them. Either it was too big to be allowed, or the value of the items was too high etc. They seemed to find reasons to not allow goods into the country.
So I imagine it isn’t so easy to purchase goods from abroad and actually receive them.
To whom ?
Cuban exiles whose property was taken ?
American industrial combines who imperialistically owned most of Cuba’s export crops and much of the land ?
The American Mob which owned the casinos and hotels ? Quite legitimately since their Havana Conference in 1946.
For the first, people have had their property stolen by revolution most times; and I have never yet seen one where full restitution was made. Partial restitution when the particular revolutionaries have been cast on the dustheap of history, but never when they remain in control. Many loyalists lost their estates in the American Revolution, if they were sensible they didn’t come back.
For the other two, it could be urged in their defence that the US had made no secret of wanting to [del]steal[/del] annex Cuba from the start ( along with Canada etc. ) and offered to buy Cuba outright several times from it’s owners; but the prospect of a post-Castro communist government, or a successor government of any stripe — except one run by Batista’s ghost — bankrupting itself to pleasure foreigners is remote.
It is, but I don’t know to what extent this is actually done in practice.
As noted above by Declan, there are different makes of cars on the roads beyond the 50s US automobiles in Cuba. I went about 3 or 4 years ago and travelled to a number of different places - Havana, Cienfuegos, Trinidad and a couple of other smaller towns - and it was really interesting that a basic potted history of where the money comes from on the island can be shown by the cars. 50s US cars travel alongside 70s Ladas and other Eastern Bloc cars, there’s the odd French car around from the 80s and quite a lot of the newer buses are Chinese made, as well as there being Hyundais and so on.
The thing is, if what you’re seeing in the USA is TV news footage, they’re going to show you establishing shots of old US cars, basically as a visual signifier that it’s Cuba. It doesn’t reflect what is going on there at all - at least with respect to the cars. There’s not a lot of money there though and, particularly in Havana, you can see that an influx of cash sensitively used to renovate and maintain their existing architecture could turn it into one of the most beautiful cities in the world.
That is to say that old US cars are a feature of the island, there’s still plenty of them on the road and reasonably well maintained at that - simply because of this lack of money; it’s probably easier to learn how to look after your car and scrape by with spare parts than buying a new one for some people. I suspects they would still like something newer though. I got talking with one of our tour guides on a trip to a coffee plantation and, despite being employed by the army, he was remarkably open. He was building his own house but was only allowed a certain amount of building supplies per month - he worked out he was going to finish putting an extra room on his two room house sometime in the early 2020s and was pretty pro the government changing tack to make life somewhat easier for everyone on the island (though he was pretty keen to say that this should happen “after the Castros have died”). Just one guy, so don’t know how common a sentiment this is - Cubans are not ignorant of the advances that have been going on elsewhere though, let’s put it like that.
If the capitalists take over they will pull down the old buildings and put up concrete vomit in the name of money; if the progressives take over they will pull down the old buildings and put up concrete crap in the name of progress.
IIRC it’s because if you already owned a car when the revolution happened you could keep it, but buying a new car needed authorization from the party AND was really expensive, so to get around this most people just kept their aging cars and kept them running. The practical effect of this might be that if relations every do normalize (and if the Cuban’s throw out this idiotic practice and allow their people to buy new cars) they may have a horde of classic car buffs descending on them to try and buy up all those old cars to restore. 
Because the reason they don’t has nothing to do with the embargo but instead has to do with their own internal policies.
Not many people in the US are going to gain much from it…which is why it hasn’t been a big push thus far.
I doubt Cuba will be returning anything.
Until the collapse of the USSR, there was thing called COMECON - a trade agreement amongst the USSR and its satellites.
This was the “funny money” by which a pound of Cuban sugar was worth a gallon of Soviet gasoline.
With the collapse of the USSR, there was in instant shortage of everything in Cuba.
As shown elsewhere, if the Communist currency tried to buy something in the real world, it didn’t go far.
Putin thought the price of oil would be enough to back the Ruble and make it worth something.
So sorry, Vlad.
The end of the Castros is not likely to signal a major change in cigarland, Mike, the guy who will probably replace them is a serious hard-liner.
The Cuban government did change their policy for 2014, they own the new car dealerships though so decided to mark them up beyond anything people could afford. If you happen to be a fabulously wealthy Cuban you can buy a new car.
Here is the first article I found on google
Isn’t it more expensive to keep a 1950s car running than it is to buy a 1990s car? On craigslist a running late 90s car is only about $1000 or so. The parts for a 1950s car and the constant repairs are going to be far more than that.
But then again you have to ship the cars in from Europe, or latin america or Canada which would add to the price.
Either way, I don’t get it. I’m used to US prices. Here once a car is at least 15 years old, its price stops declining. It drops to a grand, and doesn’t seem to get lower.