Cherished Numbers – Cuba

HAVANA —- It’s Cuba’s twist on “you are what you drive”: Here, you are your cherished number.

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 cherished number, it says more.”

Cuba’s painstaking color-coding of cherished number —- 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 only be allowed to use their cars 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.