By Joshua Robinson
Thursday, January 8, 2009
HAVANA: Sergio Morales's friends gently rib him about the dirt under his
fingernails and the grease that fills every line in his 58-year-old
hands. The grease has been there so long, they tell him, that it must
predate Fidel Castro's revolution.
But Morales has heard all the jokes, and not a single one makes him look
up from his work.
He just shifts his cigarette from one side of his mouth to the other as
his fingers twist and caress the tools in front of him, granting new
life to one of the few Harley-Davidson motorcycles that remain in Cuba.
Like Morales, and possibly the gunk on his hands, they too predate the
1959 revolution.
Morales is the last mechanic here making his living by fixing them the
old-fashioned Cuban way, working with homemade parts to preserve a
nugget of Americana in the alleys of Havana.
Harleys are believed to have arrived in Cuba as early as the 1920s,
according to Martin Jack Rosenblum, the former historian of the
Harley-Davidson Motor Company. Durable and powerful, they became
standard issue for the military and the police.
But after the revolution - and the U.S. trade embargo that followed -
the supply of Harleys and parts dried up. Soon, most of the bikes fell
into disrepair or were smuggled out of Cuba. Today, Morales said, there
are fewer than 100 here. Cared for properly, however, the old Harleys
will last seemingly forever.
"These engines are practically immortal," Morales said, adding that
rebuilding an engine takes him one to two years, given the need to
fashion his own parts.
Morales' own love affair with Harleys began in 1972, when he began
fooling around with them as a young auto mechanic. Since 1959, they had
built a reputation for being cheap, though hard to keep running.
Policemen were given the opportunity to buy their bikes from the
department for less than $40 as the pool of roughly 2,000 Harleys at the
time of the revolution slowly dwindled. Far more common were the East
German MZs.
"At first, we realized we just needed them to get around," Morales said
of the Harleys. "We couldn't buy MZs - you had to be a student - and we
didn't have any dough. Then we got to liking them because they were
tough bikes. Even without new parts, we figured out how to make the old
ones last."
Picking up tips from a few old mechanics who had once worked for
Harley-Davidson in Cuba, and fashioning his own spare parts from bits of
the cheap Communist-built cars around Cuba, Morales began to learn his
way around Harleys the way others learned musical instruments.
"It must have been the only country in the world where poor people could
buy Harleys," Morales said.
But the first Harley he bought was not one everybody could afford. He
found a 1946 Knucklehead Servicar with a 1200 cc engine. Servicars,
originally used by repairmen for house calls, were fitted with three
wheels and a small box on the back for carrying parts and tools. Morales
had to have it but, because it was in excellent condition, spent not $40
but $1,200, which amounted to six months' salary for him at the time.
"In Cuba, it's an entirely different relationship," Rosenblum said.
"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."
There are so few 1946 Knuckleheads in working condition in the United
States today, it is hard to say what one would sell for. Any surviving
bikes would most likely be ensconced in a museum, Rosenblum said.
Morales's Knucklehead currently sits outside his house on cinderblocks -
he was repairing the wheels - providing some shade for a dog.
He said it would be back on the road soon, running as well as ever, with
the name Super Abuela, "Super Grandmother."
Of course, Super Abuela has had a touch of plastic surgery. Morales once
fitted the box with a pair of small benches so that he could transport
his family - two in front and six in the back.
"If you did that in the U.S., my God," Rosenblum said, laughing,
"collectors would hunt you down and flagellate you."
Morales's personal bike is a 1950 Panhead, christened "El Indio," that
he bought in 1986 for $1,000 after selling his 1945 Flathead. It still
carries nearly all of its original parts. The wheels, though, are
borrowed from a Skoda, the Czech automobile. Morales even fitted the
bike with a sidecar, lifting the chassis from a Soviet Ural sidecar and
designing a homemade copy of a Harley body.
El Indio lives in Morales's dining room. A small grease-splattered room
with double doors that open directly into the street, it is where
Morales does most of his work, squatting on a short stool and surrounded
by parts, some original, many homemade. He wheels his bikes in and out
onto the bumpy gravel outside while his wife steps over and around the
nine engines around the room.
"It's how we've been living for 36 years," she said, shrugging.
On the walls, Mr. Morales has American flags, a few motorcycle
association plaques and a large plate that reads, "God created the world
in seven days, and on the eighth, he created Harley-Davidson."
He acquired most of the memorabilia in the last two decades, after the
Cold War began to thaw out. When information from the West began to
trickle in around 1990, Morales was able to get his hands on a
Harley-Davidson repair manual. They were the first instructions on
Harley care he had ever seen in writing.
"We learned a lot of important technical things," Morales said. "But we
had already learned pretty much everything just from doing it."
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