In Cuba, plates tag drivers, not cars

February 11, 2010 at 12:00a.m.

HAVANA (AP) — It’s Cuba’s twist on “you are what you drive”: Here, you are your license plate.

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.

“The kind of car you drive says something,” says Norberto Leon, a retiree who collects pocket change for watching parked cars. “The license plate, it says more.”

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.

Executives at government-run firms — who get caramel-colored plates — have more leeway. But even they may be allowed to use their cars only to get to and from work.

“It’s a form of control,” said Weichel Guera, a National Office of Statistics chauffeur who is assigned a government sedan that he can use only to ferry top officials during business hours. He and his Lada spend most of their time parked outside the statistics building.

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.

The Soviets also assigned numbers for embassy license plates based on a country’s recognition of the Bolshevik Revolution: Plates for Britain — the first to accept the czar’s ouster — are still 001.

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.