# Pablo Manso Cuban sheet metal worker specialized in reconstruction of 1955-1957 Chevrolets

**Date:** 05/09/2021

In Cuba, body shop worker Pablo Manso specialized in a very specific niche: 1955, 1956, and 1957 Chevrolets, for which he reproduces original body parts on machines that he himself built.

"Modern cars don't interest me," he says with a shrug next to the artisanal workshop he set up about 15 years ago beneath his house in Placetas, a rural town in the center of the island.

At 53 years old, this self-taught body shop worker claims he worked day and night to gradually learn every part of these old American sedans, and then he built a machine to manufacture their parts, adapting other necessary tools.

"I tore my hair out, as I say," he says laughing, and assures that he had to make "many sacrifices" to achieve it. "I memorized everything."

His efforts were rewarded: now people from all over Cuba request parts from him that replicate the originals, because he knows how to take care of every last detail despite the rustic nature of his workshop.

"We receive orders for parts from many countries," Pablo says proudly, citing the United States, Canada, Italy, and Spain.

The island had imported a large quantity of American automobiles in the first half of the twentieth century, but Washington imposed an economic embargo in 1962 on Fidel Castro's government, which cut off the entry of those vehicles.

"We need tractors, not Cadillacs!" Castro said then.

Currently, it is estimated that around 60,000 American cars from the 1940s and 1950s still circulate in Cuba, many of them in very good condition because they are pampered by their owners who use them for their daily lives or to drive tourists around.

Pablo Manso owns his, a red and white 1955 Chevrolet Bel Air, a true museum piece with a gleaming body and almost all original parts... except the engine, which is from a Toyota.

That is the main part that gets changed in Cuba, the old engines from the 1950s no longer hold up to so much use.

"The three years of Chevrolet: 1955, 1956, and 1957, are the three years I manufacture, because they were the three years of success" for the brand and the most sales in Cuba, because in 1955 it made "a leap into modernity."

He recounts that once he received a visit from the head of the Chevrolet workshop in Miami, accompanied by the manager of a large auto parts factory in Taiwan, who "was getting goosebumps, couldn't believe that with those rustic machines such quality parts could be achieved."

Working alongside him now is an apprentice, Lemaydi Madrigal, 32 years old, who carries large sheets of metal from one machine to another to give them the desired shape. "I practically knew almost nothing about cars" when I started, she recalls.

But now, "what I like making most are the car trunk floors: they're big, they're complicated but I like them, I think they're beautiful."