Cuba still has soft spot for Big Three

ShareThis

These are not good days for the Big Three, GM, Ford and Chrysler.
Having been humiliated by Congress for arriving in Washington aboard separate private jets to request a taxpayer bailout, they returned, chastened, by car to grovel before a committee of lawmakers -- and they still didn't get the bailout.
Finally, President Bush, a member of that new breed, the Republican Socialist, bailed out GM and Chrysler. Ford said it would stagger along on its own for a while.
Then GM played host at the Detroit auto show to Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn., who was instrumental in killing the bailout in Congress. Where once the Detroit show featured extravagant automotive fantasies in sheet metal and horsepower, Corker solemnly inspected something called a Chevy Volt, an electric car. Detroit thought it had killed off electric cars for good in the 1920s.
What American automakers need is a significant boost in morale and we have just the place for it -- Cuba. Southern Republicans like Corker may be down on Detroit iron but the commies love them.
Because new cars are very hard to come by in Cuba -- something there is about Marxism that doesn't relate well to internal combustion -- and the state-owned bus system isn't really up to the task of moving Cubans around, Fidel's successor, Raul, is urging Cubans to apply for taxi license.
The state hasn't granted any new taxi licenses since 1999 with the result that regulated taxis are in short supply but black market taxis are not. And what better taxi than a Detroit behemoth from the '50s?
Pre-Castro Cuba was the world's largest importer of American cars but that stopped in 1960s when Fidel came out of the closet as a full-blown Communist. Trapped on the island along with the Cuban people were tens of thousands of the best Detroit had to offer -- huge tail fins, wraparound windshields, and massive amounts of chrome. And thanks to the ingenuity of Cuba's shade tree mechanics, many of them are still running.
One Havana rental car company fulfills the longing in American males of a certain age to drive a '57 Chevy. A half-century from now will any American -- other perhaps that Bob Corker -- be overwhelmed by nostalgia for a Chevy Volt?
In Cuba, you can make a living with a Detroit product. The Associated Press reports on one mother who encouraged her son to quit his state job so he can drive the family's 1950s Chevrolet as a taxi. And the AP also interviewed a 35-year-old taxi driver who drove his grandfather's red and white 1952 Pontiac. GM CEO Rick Wagoner may be ridiculed in Washington but in Havana he's a hero.
The Cubans have preserved not only the usual run of Fords, Chevys and Dodges but brands that have ceased to exist in the United States, some of them for decades -- Studebakers. Hudsons, Ramblers, Packards, DeSotos, Plymouths.
GM quit making Oldsmobiles in 2004 but in Cuba the Olds rolls on. In an attempt to breathe life into a brand that had become stereotyped as stodgy, GM came up with the slogans, "This is not your father's Oldsmobile."
No, it's not. In Cuba, it's your grandfather's Oldsmobile, maybe even your great-grandfather's. Chevy Volt, indeed.

(Contact Dale McFeatters at McFeattersD(at)SHNS.com. Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, http://www.shns.com)
JUST DESSERT