Our Orange Coupé in Cuba

This is my mum, my brother and me in front of the entrance to the Sierra Maestra residential complex in Havana, where we lived in the early 1980s. Our pride was the car in the foreground: a beautifully designed orange Škoda 110 R coupé, built in Czechoslovakia between 1970 and 1980. In Cuba, where the streets were dominated by gigantic, aging American cars from the 1940s and 1950s, this low, sporty silhouette looked wonderfully exotic and always attracted attention. For many people it was probably the closest thing to a Porsche they had ever seen driving past their front door. For us it was just the family car, quietly threading our everyday life into the larger history of that time and place. We eventually sold it in Havana – and I still sometimes wonder if it might somehow be surviving on the Cuban roads today.