Have you ever been to Cuba?
Trump had just been elected over the bad old regime of the past, and the last living communist from the worst century of world history was now dead.
“It’s time to go to Cuba and see them bury this turd in the ground,” is what I thought to myself on November 25, 2016, when I read that Fidel Castro had died.
Good times were ahead. The ugly old past is going to be defeated and replaced with better.
In 2023, we remain in the process of that important change, but I did not know that on November 25, 2016.
All I knew was that the change had started.
So I sorted out what hoops I had to jump through with the awful US State Department in order to get to “impossible to get to” Cuba and went there to spit on the man’s grave.
(I was a little less forgiving then, not as willing to pray for my enemies. Today, I would have handled this a little differently, though almost certainly more outlandishly.)
In under a week, I was in Cuba, which was fine timing, since there were 8 days of mourning for “El Generalisimo” in Cuba, one for each decade of his life.
For those 8 days, no alcoholic drink would be poured and no music would be played.
I definitely had an illegal drink and on the eve of his funeral, as his body was transported from Havana in the West to the far east of the island where he started his evil regime.
Something hard to miss about Cuba is the cars.
It was once one of the most prosperous places in the hemisphere — in some regards, wealth beyond compare, which made even the poor there better off.
The number of luxury cars from the 1940s and 1950s attest to that.
It is truly beautiful -- the wonderful antique cars everywhere.
Get into one, though, and you see they are held together with bubble gum and coat hangers.
The level of poverty now is shocking.
It makes even economically depressed Puerto Rico (a place where trade is relatively freely allowed), look like an island paradise.
Same climate, similar geography and resources.
In one, the people have had half a century of relative freedom; in the other the most brutal repression and an entirely organized economy.
Cuba is a testament to what government will do to a prosperous people if you let it.
That, I believe, is the one reason US bureaucrats want you to think it is so hard to step foot on the island.
You are not to see this accessible living monument to the ills of letting a government get too powerful in your life.
Neither democrats, nor republicans deserve power in your life. Only you. That is the testament Cuba screams.
In that living monument, the cars of Cuba tell you more than you might think.
Those Detroit-made cars, in the hands of the industrious people of Cuba, in the hands of deft mechanics, in the hands of people who know how to drive them, really can be held together for 70 years, as I said, with the equivalent of bubble gum and coat hangers.
When I was a kid, people had mechanics.
The mechanics were important.
The mechanics were a regular part of life.
You maintained a car.
Now it’s a little different in the United States.
You don’t really need to do anything to a car — change some fluids, scheduled maintenance, and if you get into a car accident then the insurance company totals it out and you get a new car.
Most of that schedule gets ignored by most of the people.
A car was a different thing once upon a time.
If you hit someone, you had a mechanic pound out the dent.
Today you send the whole pile of plastic to the dump if you back into a post too hard.
No matter what Klaus Schwab says, the old hunks of metal that used to be American cars — that could keep being repaired — are infinitely more environmentally friendly than the objects we drive today.
But you could control your own destiny so well with a hunk of metal like that.
All you needed was elbow grease and knowhow, and a good mechanic didn’t hurt.
The kind of mechanic that got you to roll up your sleeves and get a good hold on a seized-up nut with him.
It was his garage and he could have you over to do as he pleased in it.
You knew you could stop by and just ask.
He was part of the community, one of the guys you had in your life.
He was more immediately important to you than the mayor or any turd you’d see on TV.
Come in to The Garage.
Stay a while.
Share what’s on your mind.
Maybe we’ll free up a seized nut or two.
Maybe we’ll use bubble gum and a coat hanger to hold something together.
Maybe we’ll talk about Cuba.
I don't know where it will go, but I know when we get the right people together, it will go somewhere good.
Allan Stevo