There are many tourist stalls in Cuba and they all sell these hand made (with a hammer and punches) souvenir plates of the current type (2002-) used there.
Cuba has a complicated system whereby the colour of the plate, the vehicle class number at the bottom, the first (province) letter and the second (status of the owner) letter are related. None of the souvenir plates has this combination anywhere near correct.
Real Cuban plates are properly pressed and have a small serial number etched on them.
These souvenir plates are usually fairly easy to spot from the way they look home made and if you check the lists of letters vs. colours vs. vehicle class numbers, you can see they are wrong. A few have been seen that are fairly close to real plates but they still have plenty of things wrong with them.
It is probably true to say that for every 10 Cuban plates that are for sale on Ebay, 8 or 9 of them are fakes.
Do not buy any Cuban plate from Ebay unless you are 100% certain it is genuine. Check with websites like Francoplaque, RPWO or ask advice about a particular plate. Otherwise, you will end up with an expensive fake that is nothing but scrap metal.
These are the plates that have recently been for sale on Ebay as of the end of 2012. There are many more like these however in collections.
These have been sold by na201, ippolitosca, aiea_de, flieger-kenner, mikemuggel, marzahn24, ovmitte,
dampflock7 and various others, including sellers on various foreign language auction sites.
[previous] [next]