In 2004, the Cuban government reversed its reliance on US dollars and printed a new currency pegged to the dollar and other foreign currency that would substitute for it. Officially stamped as “CUC”, the new bills were promptly nicknamed chavitos, after Venezuela’s socialist President Hugo Chávez who provided the cheap oil that made both the economy and Cuba’s millions of old cars (like these) run again. Captured through the windshield of another American taxi, the sheer diversity of makes and models of American cars on the streets of Cuba can be deceiving: most carry Soviet-made or Japanese engines as well as other hand-made “Frankenstein” parts, as Cubans say.
