By JOSHUA ROBINSON

HAVANA - Sergio Morales’s friends gently kid him about the dirt under his fingernails and the grease that fills every line in his 58-year-old hands. The grease has been there so long, they tell him, that it must predate Fidel Castro’s revolution.


But Mr.Morales has heard all the jokes, and not a single one makes him look up from his work.


He just shifts his cigarette from one side of his mouth to the other as his fingers twist and caress the tools in front of him, granting new life to one of the few Harley- Davidson motorcycles that remain in Cuba. Like Mr.Morales, they too predate the 1959 revolution.


Mr.Morales is the last mechanic here making his living by fixing them the oldfashioned Cuban way, with homemade parts to preserve a nugget of Americana in the alleys of Havana.


Harleys are believed to have arrived in Cuba as early as the 1920s, according to Martin Jack Rosenblum, the former historian of the Harley-Davidson Motor Company. They were standard issue for the military and the police.


But after the revolution the supply of Harleys and parts dried up. Soon, most of the bikes fell into disrepair or were smuggled out of Cuba. Today, Mr.Morales said, there are fewer than 100 here. Cared for properly, however, the old Harleys will last seemingly forever.


“These engines are practically immortal,”Mr.Morales said, adding that rebuilding an engine takes him between one and two years, given the need to fashion his own parts.


Mr.Morales’s own love affair with Harleys began in 1972, when he began fooling around with them as a young auto mechanic. Since 1959, they had gained a reputation for being cheap, though hard to keep running. Policemen were given the opportunity to buy their bikes from the department for less than $40 as the pool of roughly 2,000 Harleys at the time of the revolution slowly dwindled. Far more common were the East German MZs.“At first, we realized we just needed them to get around,”Mr.Morales said of the Harleys.“We couldn’t buy MZs? you had to be a student? and we didn’t have any dough. Then we got to liking them because they were tough bikes. Even without new parts, we figured out how to make the old ones last.”Mr.Morales’s personal bike is a 1950 Panhead, christened El Indio, which he bought in 1986 for $1,000. The bike, which would easily fetch $10,000 in the United States today, still carries nearly all of its original parts. El Indio lives in Mr. Morales’s dining room. A small grease-splattered room with double doors that open directly into the street, it is where Mr. Morales does most of his work . He wheels his bikes in and out while his wife steps over and around the nine engines around the room.“It’s how we’ve been living for 36 years,”she said, shrugging.


On the walls, Mr.Morales has American flags, a few motorcycle association plaques and a large plate that reads,“God created the world in seven days, and on the eighth, he created Harley-Davidson.”