In Cuba, license plates tag drivers, not the car

[Chris]

A rainbow of colors and an alphabet soup of codes tell the discerning eye how important you are in the egalitarian revolution as you whiz by — your nationality, what you do for a living and often how high you rank at work.

Cuba's painstaking color-coding of license plates — a system copied from the former Soviet Union — is one way authorities have kept tabs on people and their vehicles for decades.

The government owns most cars. They have blue plates with letters and numbers that indicate when and where the vehicle can operate and whether the driver can use it for personal as well as professional reasons.

Inspectors wait along highways out of town and other high-traffic areas, stopping official cars to check their route sheets and to make sure they aren't being used for a jaunt to the beach.

In the Soviet Union, Cuba's benefactor in many regards, all plates were black and white, and the first two letters specified the province where the vehicle was registered. The third letter denoted either state or private ownership.

In Cuba, the first letter in the license plate indicates which of 14 provinces the car hails from, such as "H" for Havana. The letter "K" means the car is privately owned — either by a person or by a foreign firm.

"Everyone's supposed to be equal under socialism, but when a late-model sedan with black license plates roars down Quinta Avenida (Fifth Avenue) in Havana, the driver is saying, 'Look out, I'm a big shot,'" said Tracey Eaton, a U.S. journalist once posted in Havana who now writes the blog "Along the Malecon."

The holdovers from Detroit's chrome-and-tail-fin era are still prominent on the roads because Cubans with non-VIP jobs can buy and sell only cars manufactured before the Castros took power in 1959. Buying newer vehicles requires government permission — including justifying how you can afford a car when the communist state controls well over 90 percent of the economy and pays employees an average of about $20 a month.

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