Jan 15, 2009
Harley hasn’t sold any new motorcycles in Cuba since Castro’s revolution in 1959, but that hasn’t stopped Sergio Morales from making his living as the last Harley mechanic in Havana. “These engines are practically immortal,” says Sergio. And his wife is clearly a saint. She “steps over and around the nine engines” scattered about their dining room, which doubles as Sergio’s repair shop. “It’s how we’ve been living for 36 years,” she says.
Sergio caught the Harley bug in 1972, “when he began fooling around with them as a young mechanic … re-building an engine takes him between one and two years, given the need to fashion his own parts.” Usually he makes parts “from bits of the cheap Communist-built cars around Cuba,” and makes repairs without the benefit of a manual. When he finally did get his hands on a manual, in 1990, he realized he didn’t really need it, having “already learned pretty much everything just from doing it.”
There were only about 2,000 Harleys in Cuba at the time of the revolution, but Sergio thinks there may be only 100 still running today.His “personal bike is a 1950 Panhead, christened El Indio, which he bought in 1986 for $1,000 … The bike, which would easily fetch $10,000 in the United States today, still carries nearly all of its original parts.” But Sergio suggests that Americans wouldn’t understand what the bike means to him. “In Cuba, it’s an entirely different relationship,” he says. “It’s not about the fine art worship of the machine as a rolling sculpture, but a reverence for the bike as something cool and something useful.” I don’t know about you but there has got to be an opportunity for the resourceful person that can figure out how to get bikes from or to Cuba.
Source: NYTimes
