Cubans will be able to buy new cars after 55 years of prohibition

Since 1958, Cuba has been a living museum of the automobile, thanks to the ban on buying vehicles made after that year, which was in force at the height of Castroism. The vehicles on the road in Cuba were, for the most part, American cars from the 1950s or cars of Russian manufacture, dating from the era when the Soviet Union was the main ally of Cuban communism.

However, laws opening the country to the outside world were bound to arrive at some point. The first step came a couple of years ago, when the purchase of cars between private individuals was authorised, always under state supervision and with prior permission required from the state. The final step has come in recent days, when the Cuban government authorised any Cuban citizen to buy a new car at a dealership, although the car dealership networks and their prices will remain controlled by the state.

Although the great majority of Cubans will still face serious difficulties in buying a new car, the state has at least freed buyers from the bureaucratic obstacles needed to obtain purchase permits. According to the official newspaper Granma, the permits issued after 2011 had given rise to a black market for permit sales on the Internet and to profiteering by certain figures linked to the government, who obtained them more easily and then sold the car through a simple change-of-owner procedure.

In this way, in a few years we may no longer see the classic models that were part of the landscape of the Caribbean island and that were kept running for many years, thanks to the ingenuity of Cuban mechanics, who have managed to create parts and spares almost from nothing when they could not be found on the market, let alone imported.

Source | El Economista