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A Cuban Car Rally Helped Me Discover My Roots
My father left Cuba to live in the United States in 1941, and I was born 23 years later. Sixty years after that, I got off an airplane at José Martí International Airport in Havana for the first time in my life.
A beautiful red Chrysler convertible picked me up from baggage claim. The long, low car with tall chrome-edged fins had been a Christmas gift from a Havana Chrysler representative to his wife in 1957. It now belongs to Alberto Gutierrez Alonso, the president of the Club de Autos Antiguos A lo Cubano, the Classic Car Club of Cuba.
I’d been putting off this trip for decades. What finally triggered it was an invitation to the 18th annual Castrol Cup Regularity Rally through Havana, put on by the Club de Autos Antiguos.



That it took a car event to draw me to my father’s home country can be blamed partly on my grandfather’s chauffeur, Gregorio. Sometime in the 1920s, he sat my father in his lap in the family car and taught the young boy to drive. The passion stuck. After he moved to Philadelphia, my father, by then a medical doctor as his own father had been, started racing Porsches as a rather expensive and dangerous hobby. He passed on his interest in cars to me and my brothers.
The role of classic cars in Cuba is different than in America. First, they aren’t always a hobby or even a choice. In many cases, a 1950s American car in Cuba has, for decades, served as daily transportation and been kept running despite great struggle. There was simply no better option.

Remember, the communist island nation has remained the subject of a trade embargo with the nearby United States since 1962, which makes it almost impossible to buy new American cars or parts for old ones. At some point, even as Russian and, later, Chinese models became available, vintage American cars—ironically—became icons of a nation in which it’s difficult to own them. In North American media, whenever a photo needs to represent or evoke some notion of “Cuba,” it will usually include an old car. And, of course, taking a ride in an American classic has become standard fare for any tourist trip to the island.

Even in this context, the cars of the Club de Autos Antiguos are special. The machines that filled the parking lot of the famous Tropicana Cabaret Club on a December weekend were clearly beloved objects of immense pride. While many older Buicks and Fords on Cuba’s streets wear a splotchy patina of home-sprayed paint, with rust spots on the chrome and audible rumblings of replacement diesel or gas engines, most of the club’s cars shined. The chrome was bright, and the paint gleamed. Lift the hood and there may not be much original machinery to behold, but the engine bays are tidy and clean.

The club was founded back in 2003 at the Tropicana Cabaret, a glittering holdover from pre-revolutionary days still famous for its dancers in feathered headdresses. Beyond using the parking lot as the rally’s start and end point, the car club still maintains a relationship with the Tropicana and hosts a monthly gathering there. The club gives members a chance to trade tips and advice, hosts a website where tourists can reserve rides, and does some charitable work as well.
The club has a surprising number of younger members, including Amilcar Hernandez Cepero, who drove me back from rally registration to my Airbnb rental in what he claimed, quite believably, was the only 1956 Studebaker Power Hawk in Havana. Only someone deeply committed would own a rare American model like this in a place where parts for even a Chevrolet are hard to come by. The Studebaker’s engine block was original, Hernandez told me, but the pistons were refashioned from those of a Russian truck, as was the radiator. The piston rings had been cut by hand, and there were new front disc brakes made with Ford calipers and Peugeot rotors. In Cuba, entire families specialize in these sorts of custom machine parts; Hernandez has, apparently, dealt with all of them.

My Havana Airbnb, to which we pulled up in the Studebaker, was no ordinary rental property. La Renta Godoy, as it is known, had been my grandmother’s house. Her name was Maria del Carmen, and she bought the property after divorcing my grandfather, later remodeling it to her own elegant tastes. Independently wealthy thanks to her savvy foresight in real estate dealings, she oversaw the construction of a number of high-end Havana homes. Now, my cousin, Marcos del Riego Godoy, hosts tourists and business travelers in the property’s marble-floored halls. I was granted the privilege of sleeping in the spacious bedroom that had once been my grandmother’s.




Peter Valdes-Dapena
On my second day in the city, Yali Frometa Gutierrez, a family friend and Cuban auto journalist, took me on a crowded ferry from Old Havana to the Regla district on the other side of the bay. We stopped and lit candles in the Church of Our Lady of Regla, near the ferry dock.

“¿Cómo llegamos a la calle Valdes-Dapena?” she asked passersby as we made our way uphill from the church through narrow, potholed streets.
“How do we get to Valdes-Dapena Street?”
My grandfather, Dr. Antonio Valdes-Dapena, was born in Regla. He was a successful doctor, ultimately becoming the personal physician to the Cuban president. His esteem was enough to earn him recognition on this two-block Havana street, where I became the latest of his grandchildren to have my picture taken under the sign.
My relationship with my father’s birth country and its culture has been distant, at best. My mother was of old Pennsylvania German descent, a genuine Daughter of the American Revolution. My father spoke perfect, unaccented English, and my parents only spoke Spanish at home when saying something they didn’t want the children to understand. (My mother had learned from a Berlitz teacher.)

While I was in Havana, I visited with aunts and an uncle I had never met in person, or, at least, not since I was very small. All in their 80s and still working as doctors and researchers, they were thrilled their half-brother’s youngest son had come, at last, to see them. I sat, sipped wine and coffee, and heard more details of our family and the origins of our name, stories that reminded me of the drama a name can hold.
Back at my grandmother’s house, Yali pointed out a dark brown Spanish-style desk and chair off to one side in the sun-filled foyer. They had been my grandfather’s office furniture from his Havana medical office. I wondered if the formal request cementing my family’s name might have passed across that very desk.
It had been Maria del Carmen’s idea, I was told.
In the Cuban tradition, everyone gets two last names, the father’s first and the mother’s second. Only the father’s goes from one generation to the next. My great-grandfather had been raised in an orphanage, never knowing his parents or their names. His sole last name, Valdes, was given to any male child raised by the nuns there. Andres Valdes later married a beautiful woman of Portuguese descent, my uncle told me, named Dapena.
My grandmother didn’t want her children and grandchildren to carry the default name from an orphanage but, instead, to carry the name of her esteemed husband. She drew up the papers and told Antonio to have his patient, the president of Cuba, sign to make the change official. On August 20, 1940, he did, making our name, from then on, Valdes-Dapena.

My father always said Cuba was beautiful, and he was right about that. On rally day, I climbed into the backseat of a gorgeous butter-colored 1951 Pontiac Chieftain convertible with its intact Indian-head hood ornament lit up. The streamlined Chieftain, a pillar of Pontiac’s post-war comeback, was one of the real gems among the club’s 93 cars. Surprisingly, its parts are mostly original, according to its owner, Javier Zuluaga, except for the clutch, a little sheet metal, and a repaint in its close-to-original color.
The car was driven by Zuluaga’s friend, mechanic Alberto Jorge Morales Gonzalez, with navigator Alex Diluz. Waving to the officials, we cruised out of the Tropicana parking lot on the roughly 35-mile route with rain threatening overhead.



The Castrol Cup is a regularity rally, also known as a time-speed-distance rally, which means it’s not about which car finishes first. Each section of the route has a target time, and the goal is to come closest to that time, neither more nor less. Each driver has a co-pilot whose job is to decipher the route map that is handed out only minutes before the rally starts. Wrong turns aren’t disqualifying, but they make it much harder to hit the time. There were also timed stops built-in: 10 minutes at the 66-foot statue of Jesus overlooking Havana Harbor, then five minutes at the towering José Martí Memorial in the Plaza de la Revolución.

On that warm, wet, winter day, we went through Marina Hemingway, where we made a wrong turn. Morales waved and yelled to other drivers to try to prevent them from following our errant path. Then we drove along the shore with waves crashing at the barrier walls, up to the front steps of the Hotel Nacional de Cuba, then through Old Havana and Chinatown.

At least in our car, things didn’t get terribly competitive. Diluz had no stopwatch to time the sections. When the rain came down hard we stopped while Morales and Diluz laboriously put up the top. When the sun came out again, we stopped some more to take the roof down. No one seemed to pay too much attention to how long we stopped at the big Jesus, either, while a tourist photographer snapped pictures of me in front of the giant statue.

Perhaps it was no surprise that, in the end, our big Pontiac didn’t make the podium. Clearly, we were in it for the fun. Amilcar, with his red-and-white Studebaker—last year’s winner—took third place. The victory this year went to Yipsy Diaz and her co-pilot, husband Jorge de la Rosa, in their light-pink-and-black Volkswagen Beetle, kept running with parts imported from Mexico, where the Beetle had an especially long lifespan. It marked the first win by a female driver in the rally’s history.

As we drove by the beach, I saw the new glittering hotels built for a hoped-for boom in tourist traffic. Some parts of the city and many individual homes still are indeed lovely, and I look forward to coming back for another visit. But there was an air of decay in much of the city. Belying the fun and camaraderie of that day, things aren’t always easy in today’s Cuba. Still, I could imagine how Havana must have looked to my father as he drove through town in the 1930s, when all those Art Deco buildings and even the old colonial structures, with their now faded and peeling paint, would have been colorful and bright.




Sergei Montalvo Aróstegui
















Looks like a nice way to have connected with your family roots. I pray someday Cuba may be free of communism.
You left out the most famous car dealer in Cuba named Gustavo Villoldo Chevrolet.
Ha was Cuba’s biggest car dealer for general motors. Unfortunately Che Guevara stole all his cars, and was the cause of Villoldo’s sudden death.
I pray Cubans will someday return to acommunist free Cuba. Imagine all those nice vintage Cuban cars!
I have an ad from 1957 for the Havana Ford dealer named El Relámpago; they had two locations – one at Concha and Luyanó and the other at Malecón and G. Would be interesting to see what’s there now.
What a wonderful adventure!
My wife and I visited Cuba in 2015 and got to see a lot of the island–and my ever patient bride quickly tired of me pointing out ever vintage car that we passed (which were most of ’em). I’m quite sure I saw the Pepto-Bismol pink 50 Chevy convertible in Havana, along with the DeSoto Adventurer convertible in your pictures. And speaking of convertibles, the Studebaker Hawk in your photos never came as a convertible–at least from the factory.
The two most interesting things I saw: a 60 Corvair converted to front engine, with some species of small diesel installed, and a Renault Dauphine with a similar conversion. Takes a lot of effort to swap engine ends! But Cuban mechanics are endlessly creative.
Rumors abound of high end 30s classics squirreled away in remote rural areas, hidden from the government–and sure confiscation–since the Revolution. I visited Cuba as a kid in 1957, and, living in South Florida, went to high school with Cuban kids whose parents had fled shortly after the 1959 Castro takeover. I too feel for the Cuban people and hope that one of these days the government will realize their responsibilities to the people and loosen things up. It’s so sad to see Havana–and elsewhere–crumbling.
I absolutely loved Cuba when we visited (western Canadian), the people are best and its truly my favorite southern vacation spot. I did get a taxi in the form of a ’56 Chevy 4 door for our day trip with our family (My requirement – forget the a/c tour busses) and we had an experience into Havana none of us will ever forget. Why we still embargo this country is beyond me? We have parted out cars from the 50’s they still use, can’t we help them get the automotive bits they need for their classics? Get a sea-can or two an we would all have it loaded with parts and chrome they need in no time!
They are getting the parts somehow; many classified ads for vintage Chevys on Revolico (Cuba’s Craigslist) boast of “Partes traidos desde el EE.UU” (parts brought from the USA). Not sure how that works but they’re doing it.
What a great story of History, and love of Cuba’s dedication to save these classic cars. The story shows the struggle to restore and maintain these emblems of Cuba’s past. It has been a bucket list of mine, to visit Cuba and ride in one of these gems. I too, have familial connections to Cuba; wonderful folks who came to the US decades ago. Living with us first, then moving to Tampa, then Miami. Wonderful memories made….
I worked with a guy Named Ramon Rodriquiez, a former Cuban and he always refered to Me as Fidel{Loved my nickname,we worked at General Motors in Lansing Michigan for years and now both retired____
The Cuban Chrome TV series is a fascinating look at how mechanics improvise in the country.
I really enjoyed that show, it was inspiring to see how their ingenuity and resourcefulness in keeping those cars running. I have met and befriended many people who grew up in the old Soviet bloc countries, they too have the same ingenuity and resourcefulness as they had to, just to survive.
What a beautiful and heart-warming story. Thank you so much for sharing and the photos are incredible. As a son of Miami, my mother and father would go for a week to the Tropicana in the 50’s to “go to a real city and gamble. Those were the days. My best to the Cuban people who have endured so much hardship.
We went to Cuba in November and had a terrific time. So many old American cars and they all have a story. The owners loved to talk about their cars as much as I wanted to hear about them. We were doing a biking vacay so were out in the country more and even more cars survive away from the bigger cities. Beautiful country, friendly people.
Whatever happened to Hemmingway’s Chrysler ?
The Cuban people went from a free society to one of abject misery and lack of freedom,getting food for your family is the main task,only the communist corrupt rules have means to play. Don’t support this farce
My wife and I, too, went to Cuba in November with a car club. It was all we had hoped for and more. The U.S. government requires that U.S. travelers follow OFAC (Office of Foreign Assets Control) regulations that list a dozen categories of exemptions to the usual prohibitions on travel to Cuba by U.S. citizens. (Permitted categories include history, education, religious, family, journalistic, humanitarian. Our category was Support for the Cuban People.) We traveled with several travel agent/guides who provided everything that was required for legal travel, including lodging, food, transportation and, most important, a clear explanation of all the paperwork required to enter and exit legally. Several U.S. airlines now fly directly to Havana.
The OFAC regulations prohibit any activity that directly supports the Cuban government; we stayed in privately-owned lodging, ate at privately-owned restaurants and clubs and, of course, rode in many examples of old U.S. cars from the 30’s, 40’s and 50’s owned by private individuals. We spent a couple of hours at an auto workshop (el taller) learning how the old cars are maintained, modified and painted where there are no auto parts stores.
Given the proper guidance, it’s possible for U.S. citizens to bring things like auto parts into Cuba in personal luggage. Although U.S. checks, credit and debit cards are not accepted, the use of U.S. currency is permitted for most private transactions without conversion to pesos.
The U.S. also allows the importation of certain souvenirs from Cuba into the U.S., but that does not include any Cuban tobacco or alcohol.
We saw many English-speaking tourists, but almost none from the U.S. I suppose it’s possible to travel to Cuba as a U.S. citizen on your own, but the best bet is to join a group doing it legally so you can be prepared to provide all the required documents and be able to answer the U.S. CBP questions honestly upon your return. Even with the extra difficulty, this was the trip of a lifetime for us and even after many decades of a repressive government, the Cuban people are warm and friendly and seem optimistic about their lives there.
As a civilian “advisor” in the Middle East and SubSaharan Africa during the ’80s, I was constantly exposed to Cuban soldiers in thrall to the Soviet Union,some abandoned in Africa (Angola) cuz Fidel didn’t want AIDS in Cuba. Pity he was such a tool. The Cubanos I met were car people like me, and although my languages were English, French, and Arabic I learned a lot of “carspanish”; we spent many hours perusing Road&Track, Car&Driver, Hot Rod and Car Craft, speculating on how our lives might be different… I’m in touch now, 40+ years later, with some of my surviving Cubaño friends. BTW, they have better health care than we do- don’t flame, check. I was floored privileged to be picked up at the Havana marina by my friend from decades past in a 1959 Chevrolet Impala convertible in brilliant red, white top and interior; I was born in ’59, he knew.
We should just open our junkyards and OPG/NPR/Classic Industries catalogues to these unsung heroes of preservation, screw the Kennedy era embargo. And in return we’d get, oh, I saw untarnished fin trim for ’59 Impalas, bumpers for ’46-’58 era Caddys- you have a dream old American car, the parts are in Cuba. And those cats know their cars.
Remind me to tell you about the ’65 Chrysler 300 with the Russian diesel truck engine. Yeah, it’s real.
God I wish politics would stay away from our hobby.