Los Angeles Latino International Film Festival

According to "Yank Tanks," filmmaker David Schendel's entertaining and equally enlightening documentary, at the time Fidel Castro seized power of Cuba in 1959, there were almost 150,000 American cars cruising the streets of Havana and environs.

About 40 years later, most of those classic Caddies, Buicks and Hudsons are still on the road thanks to the extremely industrious efforts of an underground Cuban network of mechanics, inventors and vintage auto enthusiasts.

Adapting to the realities of a 4-decade-old U.S. trade embargo, these men have learned to do some amazing things with chain-link fences, retrofitted chain-saw engines and homemade kilns. One cancer-defying entrepreneur makes a living relining car brakes by hand-mixing (!) his own asbestos.

While the still-rolling relics would unlikely pass a California smog test and the 70-minute running time will curb its theatrical potential, this baby is custom-built for ancillary speed.

In addition to those fascinating interview subjects, vivid digital filmmaking and the likes of Chucho Valdes and Cachao on the pulsating soundtrack, there's even more under the picture's shimmering hood.

Refusing to steer away from a larger sociopolitical context - theoretically it's illegal to operate private businesses in Cuba - Schendel's sun-kissed images of those quintessential symbols of U.S. power and prestige still gleaming defiantly through the drab, poverty-stricken neighborhoods certainly make a case for the spirit of individualism being alive and well in Castro's conformist climate.