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Driving Pan-Americanism: The Imagination of a Gulf of Mexico Highway

J. Brian Freeman
The Graduate Center
City University of New York

Abstract
This article examines the intertwined efforts of Mexican and Cuban officials, US
policy makers and business interests, as well as tourists and tourism advocates, to
link all three countries’ highway systems around the Gulf of Mexico and promote
automobile excursions in the region from the 1930s through the 1950s. Adopting
Ricardo D. Salvatore’s concept of “transportation utopia,” the article argues that
the physical and imaginary construction of this particular infrastructural project
came into being through the combined impact of the politics of hemispheric unity,
the emergence of tourism as a development strategy, and the growing vogue of
automobile touring. The article first situates the circum-gulf highway project
within an earlier history of road building, tourism, and motoring in Cuba and
Mexico. It then traces the numerous efforts by officials from all three countries to
join these road systems through a circum-Gulf automobile link, an idea that soon
became the subject of numerous articles published in such magazines and
newspapers as Popular Science, Popular Mechanics, Life magazine, and the New
York Times. Finally, the article concludes by examining the collapse of the project
in the aftermath of the Cuban Revolution.
Key words: Cuba, Mexico, Panamerican, tourism, automobile, technology

Introduction
In his treatment of western hemispheric integration during the “Machine Age,” historian Ricardo
D. Salvatore argues that the “technological marvels” of the late nineteenth and twentieth century
– canals, railroads, automobiles, and airplanes – have been “crucial to envisioning ways of
integrating Central and South America into the sphere of U.S. commerce and influence.” The
spectacular engineering efforts of the Pan-American Railroad, the Pan-American Highway, and
Pan-American Airways, in particular, “constituted projections of U.S. machine civilization into
the terrain of inter-American relations.” Salvatore calls these visions of connectivity,
“transportation utopias,” in order to emphasize their “fictional and comprehensive nature and
also to underscore the displacement of machine magic to the nonplace of ‘Pan-America,’ a
virtual space created at the conjuncture of foreign policy principles, business expansionism, and
knowledge enterprises.” 1
This article traces the planning and partial construction of an almost entirely forgotten
“transportation utopia”: the Circum-Gulf of Mexico Highway, a seagoing roadway that
attempted to connect Florida, Cuba, and Mexico through a combination of roads, oversea
bridges, and automobile-carrying ferries. The elaborate infrastructural scheme, formally
proposed at the 1936 Inter-American Conference for the Maintenance of Peace, represented an
effort to extend the benefits of the Pan-American Highway to Cuba and to link southeastern
Mexico to the east coast of the United States. 2 By the end of the decade the plan had captured

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the attention of tourists and travel writers as the still imaginary roadway offered to put an
“exotic” Cuba and an “ancient” southern Mexico within the reach of the American motorist.
Specifically, this article examines the intertwined efforts of Mexican and Cuban officials,
US policy makers, as well as tourists and tourist interests, to link all three countries’ highway
systems together around the Gulf of Mexico and promote what came to be dubbed the “Circle
Tour.” The article argues that the physical and imaginary construction of this “transportation
utopia” came into being through the combined impact of the politics of hemispheric unity, the
emergence of tourism as a development strategy, and the growing vogue of automobile touring.
The article first situates the circum-gulf highway project within an earlier history of road
building, tourism, and motoring in Cuba and Mexico. It then traces the numerous efforts by
officials from both countries to join these road infrastructures through a circum-Gulf automobile
link, an idea that soon became the subject of numerous articles published in such magazines and
newspapers as Popular Science, Popular Mechanics, Life magazine, and the New York Times.
Finally, the article concludes by examining the collapse of the project in the aftermath of the
Cuban Revolution.

Early Adventurers
By the early twentieth century Mexican and Cuban elites had eagerly adopted the automobile,
the recent must have machine-age contraption. In 1895 the first car arrived in Mexico and in
1899 – with the end of Spanish rule – the first shipment made its way to Cuba. Initially a
decidedly urban phenomenon – the only site with suitable streets – motoring quickly became
linked to a broader modernizing ethos, and in both Cuba and Mexico journalists wrote of an
“automobile craze” sweeping the countries. 3 In 1903, roads were being built to outlying
municipalities of Mexico City, an automobile club including President Díaz as an honorary
member had been founded by Pablo Escandón, and 125 vehicles dashed around the streets of the
capital. 4 That same year, automobile racing began in Cuba after the founding of the Cuban
Automobile Association, and over the course of the decade both countries became sites for
international racing events. 5 By 1911, there were around 2,000 automobiles in Mexico City and
hundreds on the streets of Havana. 6
At the very moment that Cuban and Mexican elites turned to motoring, American
enthusiasts began to look to both countries as virgin frontiers waiting to be further conquered by
car, while American automobile interests and adventuresome travelers carefully followed the
development of good roads and reported on the motoring possibilities in the region. During the
first decades of the century, books like Ralph Estep’s 1909 El Toro: A Motor Car Story of
Interior Cuba entered circulation. 7 And in 1915, the Paramount Travel company marketed its
film, Motoring, Cuba and Jamaica, to a public eager for information on auto-touring in Latin
America. 8 Auto clubs also provided information to the US public, as in the 1919 Automobile
Club of America report that observed of motoring opportunities in Cuba: “not more than six
hours by steam from Key West,” the island offers visitors “an opportunity to visit unaccustomed
scenes and view the daily life of an unfamiliar people, without having to endure the discomforts
of a long voyage and the primitive conditions often found in other countries.” 9
Likewise, motorists crossed the border into Mexico in search of adventure and the exotic.
Published under the pseudonym Clarence Young, the Stratemeyer Syndicate, later known for
their Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew series, put The Motor Boys go to Mexico: or the Secret of the
Buried City into print in 1908, and on the eve of the Revolution, in 1910 Chas. Fredrick Holder
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detailed his auto trip through northern Mexico in search of a pre-Columbian stone in the article
“Motoring in Cactus Country.” 10
With the growing interest in international automobile tourism it quickly became clear to
Mexican and Cuban policy makers that good roads did much to attract American tourists, and in
1925, both countries initiated major highway construction projects that aimed to facilitate
automobile travel outside of major urban centers. Although road building served important
domestic ends – economic integration, political centralization, and national identity formation –
officials consistently justified their efforts through references to tourism.
Following the election of Gerardo Machado in 1924, the country initiated construction of
the massive Central Highway, a project directed by tourism advocate and Secretary of Public
Works, Carlos Miguel de Céspedes. 11 The project aimed to establish a motoring link between
Havana in the west and Santiago in the east. As one representative observed, Machado’s road
construction program functioned centrally within his broader effort to attract foreign visitors to
the island in the hopes that tourism would become, after sugar, the “second industry of Cuba.” 12
Begun during the sugar boom of the 1920s, the highway was finally completed in 1933 and
extended nearly 800 miles across the island. 13
Meanwhile, in Mexico, President Plutarco Elías Calles established the National Roads
Commission (Comisión Nacional de Caminos) in 1925, marking the beginning of the nation’s
modern road building program. 14 In these early efforts to establish a national network of roads,
Mexican officials, even as they concerned themselves with unifying the nation after a ten year
armed revolution (1910-1920), were well aware that a link between central Mexico and the
northern border would do much to draw US automobile tourists. In the aftermath of Charles
Lindbergh’s arrival in Mexico City in 1927 on his famous “good will” flight, the government
eagerly anticipated “an influx of automobile tourists” and made plans to supervise major
roadways. 15 And by the end of the decade the government had formed a variety of commissions
and agencies aimed at easing entry requirements for foreign tourists and improving coordination
between offices dealing with travel, transport, public health, customs, and immigration. 16
The Cuban and Mexican road building initiatives of the 1920s coincided and overlapped
with an international push to link all the highways of the hemisphere, forming one united “Pan-
American” highway. The concept first surfaced at the 1923 Conference of American States –
held in Santiago, Chile – where US automobile industry and construction interests proposed a
road network connecting all the principle cities of the Americas via automobile highways. 17 A
year later engineers from across the hemisphere arrived in Washington to study the idea, and at
inter-American congresses throughout the rest of the decade – Buenos Aires (1925), Havana
(1928), and Rio de Janeiro (1929) – they continued to make arrangements for the highway’s
construction. 18
As these early efforts to construct an interlocking system of highways moved forward,
Cuba, although isolated by water, soon began to argue for its inclusion in the still embryonic
international project. On May 16, 1929, in what was likely the first invocation of the circum-Gulf
of Mexico Highway, Secretary Céspedes suggested to the American Road Builders Association
that the ports of the southern Florida, western Cuba, and the Yucatán peninsula should be linked
to mainland highways by way of “buques ferry” or ferry boats. 19 Though no road even connected
Yucatán to central Mexico at the time, Céspedes and later advocates began to imagine a future
stream of American motorists traveling to Mexico via Cuba, instead of the US southwest.

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These visions quickly captured the imagination of journalists and travel writers, and as
early as 1931, Alpheus Hyatt Verrill, called on visitors to “take your car to Cuba” 20 in Cuba of
Today. Increasingly writers began to publish reports detailing ferry services and the status of
road building projects around the Gulf, and as the decade came to a close adventuresome
American motorists had already begun to have their cars shipped to island. 21

New Deal to War Fear

Later that fall, the onset of the global financial crisis sent Cuba and to a lesser extent Mexico,
into an economic tailspin posing a serious challenge to plans to link the tourist economies
surrounding the Gulf of Mexico. Historians of Latin America have often pointed to this period
as a turning point in the development of the region, arguing that the contraction of global trade
encouraged countries to decouple themselves from the world economy. Yet state-supported
tourist development, discernable throughout the 1930s, represents a clear effort by policy makers
to further enter the world economy, tourism regarded by economists as an export industry in its
own right. In the context of economic crisis, both Cuba and Mexico turned to the industry as it
promised to offset declining revenue from traditional export sectors like agriculture, mining, and
petroleum, and it had the potential to augment foreign currency reserves, even out balances of
payment, and stimulate economic diversification. 22 Over the course of the decade both countries,
first Mexico, and later Cuba, set about professionalizing the tourism industry through the
establishment of state sponsored agencies and promoting numerous tourist attractions to the
international traveler. 23
Meanwhile, as Rosalie Schwartz has observed, the United States turned to tourism
promotion in Latin America as a strategy for economic recovery. New Dealers, aware that a
decline in foreign commerce had contributed to the economic collapse, viewed tourism as a way
to inject dollars into the struggling economies of the region. With bolstered currency reserves,
they argued, tourist-receiving counties would in turn be able to buy a greater number of US
goods, underwriting economic growth at home. Arriving in Cuba in 1933, special envoy Sumner
Wells confirmed this point noting that one of his primary goals included rehabilitating Cuba’s
national economy, “the market which our own exports had previously enjoyed.” 24
Traveling to Washington in 1935, a Cuban delegation petitioned President Roosevelt for
economic assistance; the advice they received: promote the island as a family friendly tourist
destination and emphasize the island’s pleasant beaches, cultural attractions, and natural beauty,
rather than its gambling halls and cabarets. Roosevelt’s proposal echoed initiatives already
underway as Cuban tourist advocates set about promoting cultural attractions, relocating
historical and art museums to more accessible areas, renovating the botanical garden, and
sponsoring musical events and community festivals, among other efforts. From 1933-34 to
1935-36 the number of visitors to the island increased 85 percent, and by 60 percent during the
1936-1937 season. 25
Yet the promotion of international travel during the 1930s represented more than an
economic recovery plan; it soon became linked to the ideal of hemispheric cooperation and
mutual respect embodied in the Good Neighbor Policy. Months after the new hemispheric
agenda had been proclaimed in 1933, the Roosevelt administration pointed to the economic and
cultural benefits of international motoring as a means to achieve “better Pan-American
understanding.” And over the next three decades, policy makers and speech writers would
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consistently invoke the idea of motoring across the Americas as both metaphor and tool for the
advancement of good neighborliness. 26
Though the politics of Pan-American road building and automobile tourism during the
first half of the 1930s may have been largely economically motivated, during the second half of
the decade US policy makers began to invoke cooperation and cultural understanding in their
efforts to bolster hemispheric defense, a clear reaction to the rising specter of fascism in
Europe. 27 Consequently, from the late 1930s through the end of the war, good roads and
automobile touring came to embody the ideal of hemispheric military preparedness, as well as
economic prosperity.
Bolstered by calls from the US government to encourage international automobile
tourism, from the mid-1930s through the end of the war, both Cuban and non-Cuban Pan-
American conference delegates would repeatedly lobby to have the island recognized as the
Caribbean extension of the Pan-American Highway. At the December 1936 Inter-American
Conference for the Maintenance of Peace, held in Buenos Aires, leader of the Cuban delegation
Dr. José Manuel Cortina recommended that studies be undertaken to see how the benefits of
mainland highways might be extended to Cuba and other Caribbean islands. 28 Two years later at
the Eighth International Conference of American States (Lima, December 1938), attendees
agreed to adopt a resolution calling for the study of an extension of the Pan-American Highway
to the so-called “repúblicas insulares de América” (the Caribbean islands) by way of “botes de
paso” or ferryboats. 29 And again, in April of the following year, delegates at the First Inter-
American Travel Congress, held in San Francisco, California, called on the Pan American
Highway Confederation to research the possibility of extending road connections to the
Caribbean islands by way of “auto-buques” or automobile ferries. 30
Concerned over competition with Mexico for automobile tourists, the Cuban promoters
also entered into direct talks with officials in Mexico City. In 1936, newspaper editor Miguel
González Rodríguez and director of the Sociedad Columbista Panamericana, Dr. Julián
Martínez Castells visited the growing motoring Mecca, meeting with vice-president of the
Mexican Tourism Association Efraín Buenrostro to discuss further efforts to link Cuba to the
Pan-American Highway through Mexico. 31 This marked the beginning of what would eventually
morph into sustained collaboration on tourism and automobile travel during the post-war period.
With the US declaration of war against the Axis powers in 1941, quickly followed by
Cuba and Mexico, reporting on motoring in both countries increased considerably, even as the
possibility of touring remained largely out of reach due to wartime automobile, tire, and oil
shortages. In his December 1942 article, “Neighbors Working Together,” Vice-President Henry
A. Wallace argued that people of the Americas were well on their way to becoming “good
neighbors,” and this, he suggested, was due in no small part to the actions of automobile tourists.
He noted that, while the Good Neighbor Policy had been in effect for nearly a decade, it was
only with the Allies’ “fight for freedom” that the countries of the Americas were “really coming
to know each other, and to find tangible and concrete ways of working together.” As proof of
this confluence of cultures, Wallace pointed to the 572 Rotary International Clubs across Latin
America and the teaching of Spanish in the schools of the United States and English in the
schools of Latin American. Suggesting other ways of getting acquainting with “our neighbors,”
he pointed to the pleasure and profit of listing to foreign phonograph records; motion pictures, he
noted as well, were good for gaining knowledge of “our neighboring peoples”; but of all methods
for forging a neighborly relationship between the nations of the Western Hemisphere, travel was
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the “best of all.” Wallace argued that as more roadways opened, an increasing number of
motorists would tour the Americas, experiencing “a great adventure in human as well as in
cultural relations.” 32
Throughout the remaining years of the war, advocates continued to promote the notion of
a circum-Gulf automobile connection. In 1941 alone, such discussions took place in Mexico at
both the Congreso Interamericano de Turismo and the IV Congreso Panamericano de
Carreteras. 33 During the later, attendees approved a motion presented by the Cuban delegation
which, after years of lobbying, officially recognized the proposed route running through the
Yucatán Peninsula and on to Cuba’s Central Highway as an extension of the Pan American
Highway. As the war came to a close in 1945, delegates from each country bordering the Gulf
Circuit attended a special summit dubbed the Conferencia Turística Miami-Cuba-México (held
from February 9-15) where attendees resolved to cooperate in the development of comfortable
and affordable maritime transport services between the ports of Florida and Havana and Cuba
and Mexico in order to intensify tourist flows around the Gulf. 34 And at the Reunion Plenaria
Annual de la ‘Comision Turistica Miami-Cuba-Mexico, held in Mexico from November 10 to 15
of the following year, delegates once again issued a call to advance work on the Miami-Cuba-
Mexico link. Furthermore, proclaiming its status as an international motoring destination,
representatives from the automobile clubs of Latin American gathered in Havana for the 1946
FIAC (Federación Interamericana de Automóvil Clubs) annual meeting, where they discussed
the importance of regional efforts to increase the flow of tourists, and continued to explore the
need for international cooperative measures. 35

Post-War Dreams
During the post-war period US reporters and travel writers enthusiastically commented on the
status of the Circuit and provided American tourists with information gathered through informal
reconnaissance missions. In 1946, less than a year after the war had ended, Popular Mechanics
magazine called on its readers to “drive to the other Americas” “now that the family car is rolling
again.” With plans to establish car ferries between Florida, Cuba, and Mexico, automobilists on
the Atlantic seaboard would be able to save 800 miles on their way to Mexico City. Rather than a
trip exclusively for the wealthy, the magazine suggested that it did not matter if you had a
“spanking new 1946 model” or a “patched-up vehicle whose vintage dates back to the 1930s.”
Through a brief history of the Pan-American Highway, the author offered readers a narrative of
US military ingenuity, a project apparently inspired, planned, and implemented by the US, for
the benefit of the entire hemisphere. And by taking a trip along the highway motorists would be
able to witness the spectacular transformation of the region as gas stations, garages, motor
courts, and restaurants began to pop up along the route. 36
Similar discussions of motoring to Cuba and beyond appeared in travel guides like
Sydney Clark’s, All the Best in Cuba, where he encouraged motorists to “drive your car to
Cuba,” and in 1948 Herbert Lanks noted in his travel account that “[f]uture automobilists will
probably accompany their cars on the ferry from Key West to Havana,” even though he has
decided to ship his car on a small freighter and fly instead. 37 Providing readers with a series of
sights one might encounter on such an adventure, in 1947, Life magazine published fifteen
paintings by artist Doris Lee, documenting her motor trip to Cuba, around the Gulf Coast of the
US, and on to central Mexico.38 Generously illustrated with bright colors, Lee’s painting
documented a variety of folkloric scenes: men and women fishing off the overseas highway to
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Key West, a woman with a decorative fan sitting on a balcony, a mother and child on donkey,
bathers in a river, street vendors, and so on.
During these years maps of the circum-gulf route presented the uncompleted
transportation network as a material reality. In a 1954 issue of Popular Science, the magazine
published the article “New Road to Turn History’s Vivid Pictures,” illustrated with an cartoon-
like image of the Gulf of Mexico and inscribed with representative icons of local and national
identity in Florida, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Mexico, and Cuba. Beside Cuba
readers were presented with images of beautiful beaches, jumping marlins, and colonial-era
structures, while in Mexico the standard fare of churches, pre-Columbian ruins, folkloric
activities, and cactuses appeared everywhere but in Mexico City, beside which appeared a row of
modernistic buildings. 39 Quoting a former chief of the Inter-American Regional Office of the
U.S. Bureau of Public Roads, the article reinforced the message of the illustration noting that,
“[t]o the observant and interested traveler,” a trip on the route “would be like cutting a cross
section of the ages.”

From the advanced Anglo-Saxon civilization and culture of the United States, he
would pass through the Cuban development of Spanish culture and then go
backward into the days of the Mayan. As he left Yucatan and entered Mexico,
the process would be reversed. He would first pass through an advanced stage of
Indian civilization, and finally return to the culture and customs of Anglo-Saxon
America. 40

With the widespread popularity of automobile tourism, inspired by the democratization of

the automobile and the expansion of tourist facilities, Cuba and Mexico continued to streamline
international travel requirements during the post-war years, and by the 1950s both countries
permitted visitors to cross boarders for stays of up to six months with no more than a tourist or
landing card; by the mid-1950s motorists could enter Cuba without paying a duty on their car nor
having to acquire any special license. Meanwhile, most other Latin American destinations
continued to required a confusing mix of visas, passports, photos, vaccinations, pre-purchased
tickets to exit the country, and exit permits, documents that usually had to be obtained in
advance. 41
Arguing that infrastructure integration represented a benefit to all parties, delegates at the
1953 Tercer Congreso Interamericano Regional de Caribe held in Havana, discussed and
adopted a resolution proposed by Mexico entitled “Circuito Turistico del Golfo de Mexico y del
Caribe.” The resolution discussed the possibility of a much broader circuit, encompassing the
entire Caribbean as well as a multifaceted integration that considered more extensive air, postal,
and telecommunications projects. Attendees argued that regional integration would benefit all
parties involved, stating: “Taking into account the reciprocal interest that the tourist creates, we
ought to provide the tourist that travels the Circuit the best customs and migratory facilities…We
ought to promote Regional Tourist Services in official and private spheres, in the vital zones of
the Circuit, which will make the transport and lodging of great masses of tourists possible.” 42
Meanwhile, in Cuba, tourist promoters continued calls for tighter regional links. In 1953,
José Manuel Cortina, addressed attendees of a conference on the “Pan-American Highway and
the Caribbean Circuit,” organized by the Havana Lions Club. He demanded that the “problem of
automobile transport between Florida, Cuba and Yucatan” be resolved, since a communication
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link not only favored Cuba, but the lack of a link had the ability to “definitively prejudice
[Cuba]…from all points of view.” With numerous references to the “millions of automobiles” in
the United States, Cortina questioned how there could be a successful tourism industry in Cuba if
motorists could not travel to the Island in any significant number. “The traveler that goes to
Florida with his car and that likes the autonomy of movement that characterizes the North
American,” he argued, “will never come to Cuba if he does not have the means to easily take his
automobile…[and]…with it…his relatives and children.” Cortina continued by contemplating
the character of the North American. “What do North Americans look for, and, in general all
men tired from the emotional trepidation of modern life? Pure air, beautify landscapes, nice
forests, serenity, silence… and confort.” Noting the regenerative effects of the waters of a local
spring, San Diego de los Banos, Cortinas asked, “Is there an affliction more terrible in the United
States than hypertension? What business man does not want a tonic that lowers his blood
pressure, altered by the emotionality of life? The baths of San Diego almost always lower one’s
blood pressure, moderately.” 43
Nevertheless, meeting in 1953, shortly after Fulgencio Batista’s aggressive rise to power,
Cortina could not avoid acknowledging the destabilizing effect of political conflict. 44 In his
speech he lamented a decline in the tourist industry. “[T]he flow of tourists that came to Cuba is
disappearing by the day…diverting to other places. We must be making great mistakes, when,
given our privileged situation, we are losing the game.” 45 For Cortina, political instability had
come to undermine Cuba’s privileged position as the bridge to Latin America.

Cuban Revolution, a Bumpy Road

On January 1, 1959, President Fulgencio Batista fled Cuba as Fidel Castro and the rebels of the
26th of July Movement seized control of the Island. 46 This and associated events set in motion an
outpouring of “unfavorable information,” cutting to a “trickle” the flow of tourists to Cuba. That
summer hotels catering to tourists reported an occupancy rate of just 20 percent, while casinos
remained nearly empty. 47 In an effort to bolster tourism, the revolutionary government aimed to
revitalize the industry by easing travel restrictions. To that end, in September national police
chief Efigenio Almeijeiras issued an order allowing travelers to enter the country without tourist
identification cards. 48
Yet Cuban officials struggled to reconcile a revolutionary, anti-imperialist agenda with
their desire to maintain a strong flow of visitors. The regime allowed an American Society for
Travel Agents (ASTA) convention in Havana to proceed as planned, taking the opportunity to
promote the new Cuba. Over 2,000 people attended the October ASTA meeting, surpassing the
numbers of the New York City gathering held the year before. Attending the event, Fidel Castro
announced to attendees that the new regime was engaged in efforts to open new beaches, build
roads to picturesque sites, and construct more hotels, declaring that Cubans would “welcome
tourists with open arms.” Reacting to counter-revolutionary efforts, Castro called on visitors not
to be swayed by “political propaganda” against the revolution, 49 attacking efforts directed
against the regime by the U.S. government. Yet as Castro promoted the new face of tourism, a
Cuban pilot who had taken off from an airfield in the United States, distributed anti-Castro
leaflets over Havana. 50
As the new Cuban regime attempted to salvage the nation’s tourism industry, Mexican
road builders worked away on the final phase of the Central Mexico-Yucatán Highway. By the
turn of the decade, the link finally connected the peninsula to the heart of Mexico and the larger
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Pan-American Highway. Travel journalists quickly relayed news of the highway’s completion to
tourists in the United States, and one such writer noted enthusiastically that motorists now had
“easy access to that rich, tropical land and the great Mayan ruins there.” 51 In February of the
same year, a contributor to the New York Times took the trip from Mexico City to the far eastern
edge of the Yucatán Peninsula, confirming for skeptical readers that the journey was in fact
possible. What is more, the writer had even encountered “tourists from Florida who had shipped
their car in by way of Cuba and were planning to drive back to the States through Mexico.” 52
Yet, by 1962, diplomatic ties between the United States and Cuba had been broken, a
trade embargo established, and travel restrictions imposed. Even before these measures were
taken, visitors had begun to turn away, and tourists and tourism interests had already begun to
divert their attention to neighboring islands and to Mexico. As early as 1959, eight ship lines
canceled visits to Havana due to the political instability. 53
Conveniently leaving out any reference to Cuba, on May 7th, 1963, John F. Kennedy
discussed the status of hemispheric travel and transportation facilities before the Pan American
Highway Congress. “I can’t believe that we could concentrate our efforts on any great enterprise
which has more significance, symbolically and actually, than the development of this highway,”
he announced.

The more we can do to link the sister republics of this hemisphere in one great
community, the stronger we will all be, the greater we will serve our national
interests, and the more abundant we will make the life of our people. This is a
matter of consuming interest and consuming passion of this Government and this
people in the United States in these days…So we are very glad to have you here.
I think it is a question not only of building these roads but also maintaining them,
as part of a general program for the development of the resources of all of our
countries. 54

Cuba, the island that had once been promoted as a central component of the Pan-American
Highway and a major transportation link between North and South America no longer merited
mention. Paradoxically, Kennedy’s call on delegates to not only build roads but maintain them
awkwardly highlighted the recent removal of island from that very system of communication.
In the aftermath of the travel ban, maps and discussions of the Pan-American Highway
slowly began reflect the larger political conflict and the former Caribbean extension of the
roadway began to fade from memory. In one such instance, the May 1963 edition of The
Rotarian detailed the status of the “Pan American Highway System” on the eve of the Ninth Pan-
American Highway Congress. The article offered a colorful map of folkloric inspiration in which
Cuba was nowhere to be found. 55 During that same month Kennedy further called on Latin
American nations “to curb the flow of people of Cuba” and governments in the region “to control
the movement of their citizens to” the island. 56 Travel itself had become subversive and the ideal
of complete regional integration was abandoned by the United States in the context of Cold War
politics, thus marking an inversion of the discourse on economic, political, and cultural benefit of
cross-national contact.

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Postscript
During July 2003, without any official endorsement of the plan, twelve Cubans re-inaugurated
the circum-gulf automobile route when they set off for Florida in a seaworthy 1951 Chevy
pickup truck. Rigged with oil drums for flotation and a propeller powered by the vehicle’s drive
shaft, the bright green truck sputtered along at eight miles an hour until the US Coast Guard
intercepted it. The Guard eventually sunk the contraption and repatriated the driver and
passengers, dubbed camionautas (truckonauts), to Cuba. But over the following years others
continued to attempt to quixotic feat. In February 2004 three of the original camionautas headed
for the US in a 1959 Buick, welded into a watertight vessel, replete with the nose of a ship
attached in front. And again in June 2005 Rafael Díaz Reyes took off for Florida his 1949
Mercury station wagon, carrying thirteen people. 57 At the dawn of the twenty first century, these
seagoing automobilists turned to the very artifacts of U.S. machine civilization, iconic relics
from the era of post-war transportation utopianism, in their inventive effort the gain asylum.

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Endnotes
1
Salvatore, R. D., "Imperial Mechanics: South America's Hemispheric Integration in the Machine Age,” American
Quarterly, 58, no. 3, (2006): 663-4.
2
Sociedad Columbista Panamericana. “Cuba y la carretera panamericana,” (Union Interamericana del Caribe,
Habana, 1957), 7-8.
3
Louis A. Pérez, Cuba in the American Imagination: Metaphor and the Imperial Ethos (Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press, 2008), 336.
4
The Horseless Age, July 1, 1903, 47.
5
Pérez, Cuba in the American Imagination, 256.
6
Dun’s Review: International Edition, September 1911, 49.
7
E. Ralph Estep, El Toro: A Motor Car Story of Interior Cuba (Detroit: Packard Motor Car Company, 1909).
8
The Moving Picture World, July 24, 1915, 740.
9
Edward H. Wakefield, “Notes on Touring Cuba,” Motor Travel, June 1918, 37.
10
Clarence Young, The Motor Boys go to Mexico: or the Secret of the Buried City (Cupples and Leon, 1908);
Excerpts of “Motoring in Cactus Country,” quoted in Bulletin of the International Bureau of the American
Republics, Volume 30, January-June, 1930, 538-543.
11
Rosalie Schwartz, Pleasure Island: Tourism and Temptation in Cuba. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press,
1997), 51.
12
“Cuba Plans Extensive Building of Highways,” New York Times, Jan 9, 1927, W18; James P. Welsh, “The Cuba
Central Highway is now Open to Motorists,” New York Times, Dec. 8, 1929, XX12.
13
Edwin J. Foscue, “The Central Highway of Cuba,” Economic Geography 9, no. 4 (1933): 406-412.
14
González Gómez, Ovidio, “Construcción de carreteras y ordenamiento del territorio,” Revista Mexicana de
Sociología 52, no. 3 (1990): 59; Wendy Waters, Re-mapping the Nation: Road Building as State Formation in Post-
Revolutionary Mexico, 1925-1940 (Ph.D Diss., University of Arizona, 1999), 56.
15
Russell Owens, “Lindbergh Impetus Decides Mexicans to Use Air Lines,” New York Times, Dec. 22, 1927, 1.
16
Alex Saragoza, “The Selling of Mexico: Tourism and the State, 1929-1952,” in Fragments of a Golden Age: The
Politics of Culture in Mexico Since 1940, Gilbert Michael Joseph, Anne Rubenstein, Eric Zolov, eds. (Durham:
Duke University Press, 2001), 101
17
J.L. Harrison, “The Pan-American Highway,” in Highways in Our National Life: A Symposium, Jean Labatut, ed.
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1950), 182.
18
Salvatore, 676.
19
Sociedad Columbista Panamericana, 6-7.
20
Alpheus Hyatt Verrill, Cuba of Today (New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1931), 65
21 US discussions of the Gulf Circuit increased considerably in the 1950s as Mexico’s Gulf Coast highway neared
completion. See for example, S.R. Winters, “Encircling Gulf by Car,” New York Times, Feb. 5, 1939, XX7;
“Southward Ho!,” Time, Sep. 17, 1945; Bert Pierce, “Cuba Urges Ferry to Florida, Mexico,” New York Times, Jan.
16, 1946, 28; R. Hart Phillips, “Cuba Sets A Tropical State For Tourists, New York Times, Nov. 1, 1953, XX9; Flora
Lewis, “Gulf Circle Tour,” New York Times, Oct. 4, 1953, X21; Paul J.C. Friedlander, “Going to Cuba By
Automobile,” New York Times, Oct. 10, 1954, X23; Paul Kennedy, “Yucatan Plans For Its Day In the Tourist Sun,”
New York Times, Nov. 1, 1959, XX15.
22
In Mexico, according to Stephen Haber, a “major contraction was under way by 1926 and intensified until 1932,”
after which a recovery began. In Cuba, the onset of world depression drove its major export, sugar, down 60 percent,
while its US market share plummeted from 49.4 percent in 1930 to 25.3 percent in 1933 due to enactment of the
protectionist Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act. On Mexico see Stephen H. Haber, Industry and Underdevelopment: The
Industrialization of Mexico, 1890-1940 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995), 169; for Cuba see Leslie
Bethell, The Cambridge History of Latin America: Latin America in 1930: Mexico, Central America, and the
Caribbean (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 422.
23
There is a growing literature on tourism in both Cuba and Mexico. See for example, Schwartz, Pleasure Island;
Dina Berger, The Development of Mexico's Tourism Industry: Pyramids by Day, Martinis by Night (New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2006); Dennis Merrill, Negotiating Paradise: U.S. Tourism and Empire in Twentieth-Century
Latin America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009).
24
Quoted in Louis A. Pérez, Cuba and the United States: Ties of Singular Intimacy (University of Georgia Press,
2003), 203.
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25
Schwartz, 95, 98.
26
Franklin D. Roosevelt, “Statement on the Conference of American States,” in John T. Woolley and Gerhard
Peters, The American Presidency Project (Santa Barbara, CA: University of California),
http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=14549 (Accessed, February 1, 2010).
27
Fredrick B. Pike, FDR's Good Neighbor Policy: Sixty Years of Generally Gentle Chaos (Austin: University of
Texas Press, 1995) 228-229.
28 Sociedad Columbista Panamericana, 7-8.
29 Ibid, 7-8.
30 Ibid, 8-9.
31 Ibid, 7.
32
Henry A. Wallace, “Neighbors Working Together,” The Rotarian, Dec. 1942, 8-10; Even before the US had
entered the war, Roosevelt had declared 1940 to be “Travel America Year,” in order to encourage inter-American
tourism. The initiative represented and early incarnation of the well documented US effort to bolster hemispheric
solidarity (and US hegemony) through such institutions as the Office of Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs
(CIAA). Led by Nelson Rockefeller, the CIAA attempted to undermine Axis propaganda in the region through the
distribution of US-friendly newsreels, documentaries, and films. See Stephen R. Niblo, Mexico in the 1940s:
Modernity, Politics, and Corruption (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 1999), 333-354.
33 Sociedad Columbista Panamericana, 10.
34 Ibid, p. 16-17
35
América, órgano de la Federación Interamericana de Automóvil Clubs (Buenos Aires, 1955), 20
36
Popular Mechanics, August 1946, 154-159.
37
Sydney Clark, All the Best in Cuba (New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1946), 12; Herbert Charles Lanks,
Highway Across the West Indies, (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1948), 1.
38
Life, May 12, 1947, 72-81.
39
For a discussion of the presentation of Mexico as modern and cosmopolitan while simultaneously traditional and
folkloric see Eric Zolov, “Discovering a Land ‘Mysterious and Obvious’: The Renarrativizing of Postrevolutionary
Mexico,” in Gilbert Joseph, et. al., Fragments of a Golden Age: The Politics of Culture in Mexico Since 1940
(Durham: Duke University Press, 2001), 234-72.
40
Popular Science, September 1954, 146-148.
41
Norman D. Ford, The Fiesta Lands: Through Mexico and Central America on a Shoestring (Greenlawn, NY:
Harian Publications, 1954), 74.
42
Sociedad Columbista Panamericana, 18-19.
43
José Manuel Cortina, “La Carretera Panamericana y el Circuito del Caribe. Conferencia,” (Havana: San Pedro,
Villalta, y Hno., 1954), n.p.
44
On March 10, 1952, Batista staged a bloodless military coup, ruling Cuba for the next six and a half years. He
eventually lost control of the country due to the growing strength of both rural- and urban-based revolutionary
forces.
45
Cortina, n.p.
46
The 26th of July Movement was the name of the guerrilla army led by Fidel Castro. The date refers to the failed
attack on the Moncada Barracks on July 26, 1953.
47
Paul Kennedy, “An Uneven Summer for Caribbean Tourism,” New York Times, Aug. 16, 1959, X21.
48
“Travel to Cuba Eased,” New York Times, Sept. 6, 1959, 5.
49
“Tourists from U.S. Wooed by Castro,” New York Times, Oct. 20, 1959, 12.
50
“Castro’s Cuba and Tourism,” New York Times, Nov. 1, 1959, XX25.
51
Robert S. Benjamin, “Mexico Aids the Motorist,” New York Times, Nov. 6, 1960, XX21.
52
Jean H. Uke, “A Motor Tour into the Land of the Maya,” New York Times, Feb. 21, 1960, X37.
53
Werner Bamberger, “5 More Ship Lines Cut Calls at Cuba,” New York Times, Nov. 14, 1959, 42.
54
John F. Kennedy, “Remarks to the Delegates to the Pan American Highway Congress,” in John Woolley and
Gerhard Peters, The American Presidency Project (Santa Barbara, CA: University of California),
http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=9187 (accessed February 1, 2010).

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55
The Rotarian, May 1963, 14-15.
56
Tad Szulc, “President Seeks Curb by Latins on Trips to Cuba,” New York Times, May 7, 1963, 1.
57
Javier Aparisi, “Camionautas cubanos sueñan con volver,” BBC Mundo, May 22, 2007,
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/spanish/international/newsid_6622000/6622011.stm (Accessed February 1, 2010).

The Journal of Latino-Latin American Studies, Volume 3, Number 4, Fall 2009-Spring 2010,
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