Life without oil: Conor Popedrives through Cuba, a country that has been virtually petroleum-free for 15 years
Bringing a solitary Luke Kelly cassette on our 800km road trip from Havana to the Bay of Pigs is a mistake. As we barrel along an empty Carretera Central, the motorway that spans Cuba from east to west, the incongruous sound of Raglan Road playing at full volume for the millionth time drowns out the cries for help of our little rental car's engine.
When it can take no more of the repetitive strain that five Irish bodies tunelessly singing is placing on its overworked heart, it begins to shudder in a way that is impossible to ignore. We consult our tourist map, which is marked with Cuba's 15 functioning, dollar-only petrol stations. Miraculously, one is close by.
We coax our lame car into the garage, where six underemployed mechanics fall on it like a Formula 1 pit crew. Minutes later the boss tells us gravely that an enchufe is knackered. Sounds serious, but what's an enchufe? He reaches under the bonnet and pulls out a blackened spark plug. Two a penny and easy to replace, surely? But replacing things is not the Cuban way. After three hours of filing and blowing on the enchufe, the mechanics have the engine purring like a tiger having its belly rubbed.
Cuba has lived a virtually oil-free existence for 15 years, which has forced people to use and reuse their limited resources. It's this resourcefulness rather than American engineering that explains why so many US-made cars from the 1940s and 1950s still prowl its cities' streets decades after they found themselves on scrap heaps elsewhere.
And it doesn't stop with cars. On the steps of Havana's Capitol Building an old man makes a living taking tourists' photographs with a box camera that must be 80 years old. He exposes the film by whipping a beer-bottle cap off the lens for up to a minute, then wedges it back in place. Lord knows how it works, but he sells the shots for $1 a time.
Cuba's chronic shortages are the inevitable consequence of the sudden collapse of its sponsor, the Soviet Union, and the sustained US economic blockade - "a stranglehold that has been ruled completely illegal by every relevant international body", according to Noam Chomsky.
Just keeping things going became hugely difficult after the economic meltdown of 1991, when the last Soviet personnel left the country, taking annual economic subsidies worth $6 billion with them. Every water bottle discarded by a tourist is reused by a local, and every copy of Granma, the state-run newspaper, is given a new life as insulation or kindling (and, in truth, is much better at either than as a news source).
With no money, and few countries able or willing to engage in meaningful trade, Cuba wilted, and luxuries - if a working fridge can be considered a luxury - disappeared from the state-run stores.
Perhaps having flipped through Ireland's big book of ridiculous euphemisms and seen that "the Emergency" was already taken, Cuba dubbed this era the Special Period.
Food production plummeted, and Cubans' calorie intake fell by 30 per cent. But the people kept going, community spirit blossomed and ordinary people looked out for each other in extraordinary ways. Horse-drawn carts replaced school buses, and a new law obliged state officials to pick up hitchhikers.
With resilience and determination it worked something of an economic miracle. In 1993 Cuba recognised the dollar and opened to tourism. At the same time it moved from being a heavily industrialised society to a largely agrarian one - it wasn't so much a case of back to the future as forward to the past.
With no oil left for tractors, oxen were once more harnessed to ploughs, growing methods changed to facilitate hand-picking and every available urban space became a mini farm - almost half the food consumed in Cuba is now grown on urban farms - and a society in which meat was a staple became virtually vegetarian overnight, making the Cuban diet considerably healthier, if a lot duller.
Despite the shortages, Fidel Castro's regime insisted that medical and education systems - models of best practice for other developing-world countries - would not suffer. The numbers of working doctors increased, and class sizes fell, during the Special Period.
Although Castro has always displayed an admirable commitment to improving the health and literacy levels of his people, he has also consistently betrayed them with rigged elections, crass censorship, the jailing of dissidents, executions and appalling treatment of minority groups.
The US doesn't like taking anything from Cuba, but it may some day have to take lessons on energy management. Per capita, Cubans use just a fifteenth of the oil that Americans go through each year, but their quality of life, measured through health and education, is considerably higher. Cubans, who live for as long as Americans, benefit from free medical care and lower infant mortality. They also have more doctors per capita, and those doctors regard their jobs as vocations rather than as a way to get rich.
That said, the absence of oil can make life very hard. Jorge is a biochemist who worked in a sugar-production facility about 40km from his home in a remote and mountainous village. When the oil disappeared he was forced to abandon his car, and for two years he cycled the 80km round trip every day.
Crippling back pain eventually forced him to stop cycling, so now he runs a stall in his village, selling juiced sugar cane. There is little passing trade, and on a good day he might sell four or five cups of his sweet concoction.
The day that our car - still going 1,500km after our pit stop - rolls into town is a very good one. We drink the juice and give him $1 each - it is a third of his monthly wage. He brings us to a private house for a meal; we get chicken and he is given horse. Feigning a desire to eat horse meat, I engineer a swap so he can have my chicken - a very rare treat for Cubans. The horse is horrible.
Then he brings us to his home, a small corrugated-iron shed with a single light bulb expected to illuminate all three rooms. He opens his scrapbook and shows us his military honours, which carry the seal of Che Guevara, who is still considered a god in Cuba. Jorge grows teary-eyed as he talks of the young Che and Fidel.
Despite the lack of everything that we take for granted, his pride and faith in the revolution are unshakeable. The Special Period will come to an end, he says, and the future will be brighter, illuminated perhaps by oil from Venezuela, Cuba's new best friend, and newly discovered oil of its own. Meanwhile, he has a Luke Kelly tape to listen to.