Following the January 1959 revolutionary victory, Sío Wong told the audience, he approached Rebel Army commander Ernesto Che Guevara. “I said, ‘OK, Che, the war’s over. I want to go back to school and become an electrical engineer.’ Che replied, ‘You’re leaving now? Don’t be a jerk. Now is when the revolution begins!’”

Sío Wong said this episode, which had a deep impact on him, is told in Our History Is Still Being Written: The Story of Three Chinese-Cuban Generals in the Cuban Revolution. All three authors—Gens. Armando Choy, Gustavo Chui, and Sío Wong—spoke at the October 24 meeting, along with Iraida Aguirrechu, a senior editor at Editora Política, the publishing house of the Cuban Communist Party’s Central Committee, and Mary-Alice Waters, editor of the book and president of Pathfinder Press.

In Our History Is Still Being Written Choy, Chui, and Sío Wong tell how, as young rebels of Chinese-Cuban descent, they joined the revolutionary war that toppled the U.S.-backed dictatorship and opened the road to the first socialist revolution in the Americas. In a lifetime of revolutionary activity, they each became a general in Cuba’s Revolutionary Armed Forces, and continue today to shoulder major leadership responsibilities.

Choy organizes the cross-ministry working group responsible for transforming the infrastructure of the port of Havana and restoring the environmental health of the bay. Sío Wong, who remains on active duty in the Revolutionary Armed Forces, is president of the National Institute of State Reserves. Chui is part of the national leadership of the Association of Combatants of the Cuban Revolution.

The Havana meeting was one of seven book presentations that also took place in three eastern cities—Holguín, Bayamo, and Santiago de Cuba—as well as in Ciego de Avila, Quemado de Güines, and Corralillo in the central region. In each place the events were hosted by the Association of Combatants of the Cuban Revolution (ACRC) along with the municipal government and the Cuban Communist Party (CCP) in the province.

The initiative for the trip to the eastern part of the country came from the ACRC, which in February had organized seven presentations in Havana and cities in central Cuba following the Havana International Book Fair, where the title was launched.

More than 1,000 people attended the meetings. They included members of the Combatants Association, Chinese-Cuban residents, high school students, and members of mass organizations such as the Federation of Cuban Women and Committees for the Defense of the Revolution. Among them were the presidents and vice presidents of city and provincial governments and Cuban Communist Party leaders including the party first secretaries in four provinces.

The cross-country tour also included visits in each city to museums and other sites highlighting Cuba’s revolutionary history. The hosts also took their visitors to see recent accomplishments, such as an attractive new housing development in Bayamo and a newly rebuilt and expanded municipal clinic in Corralillo now offering 18 diagnostic and other services, for which residents previously had to travel to other nearby cities.

Cuba’s Chinese heritage was a feature of the tour, from a dinner at the Chinese association’s hall in Ciego de ávila to a martial arts demonstration by junior high school students in Havana.

The Havana meeting was held at the José Martí Experimental Secondary School, a special school organized as part of the educational revolution under way in Cuba. The teachers, most in their late teens or early 20s, attend an accelerated teacher training program. Classes have no more than 15 pupils per teacher, and are organized to allow teachers to give more personalized attention to the students, ages 12-15, many of whom are from some of poorest and most overcrowded predominantly working-class areas in the city.

At the meeting Aguirrechu, who introduced each of the speakers, noted that Our History Is Still Being Written is one of more than 60 titles by Pathfinder on the Cuban Revolution. Editora Política, she reported, is now preparing a Cuban edition of the new book.

Aguirrechu introduced Waters as the book’s editor, president of Pathfinder, and a member of the Political Committee of the Socialist Workers Party. She also introduced other members of the group reporting for the Militant: Martín Koppel, a member of the party’s National Committee and one of the book’s interviewers; David Argüello, a Young Socialist and Socialist Workers Party candidate for U.S. Congress in San Diego; and Michel Dugré, a garment worker, member of the Communist League in Canada, and its candidate for Toronto city council.

Through Our History Is Still Being Written, Waters said, working people are introduced to the Cuban Revolution as “a practical example of how to fight, how to win, and even more importantly, how to organize to defend what we have won.” She pointed to the positive response to the book in the United States, especially among Chinese and other Asian Americans, as seen in a September 9 meeting of nearly 200 sponsored by the Chinese Historical Society of America in San Francisco’s Chinatown.  
 
Chinese-Cubans in independence wars
Chui told the youthful audience that all three generals had joined the movement to overthrow the Batista dictatorship as teenagers. They became combatants in the Rebel Army, and later each of them carried out internationalist missions in Angola and elsewhere. Today, he said, they remain active “not as veterans—but as combatants.”

He urged students to read Our History Is Still Being Written. “The struggle and sacrifice of all those who have fought for Cuba’s independence has not been in vain,” Chui said. “You are our successors in defending Cuba’s sovereignty and our revolution.”

Choy told the audience, “It’s important to make known the history of the participation of the Chinese in our independence wars.” He noted that next June will mark the 160th anniversary of the arrival of the first Spanish ships bringing Chinese indentured laborers to Cuba. “They were virtually slaves,” he said. Rebelling against these conditions, thousands of Chinese joined the ranks of pro-independence fighters and became known for their loyalty and bravery.

An estimated 6,000 Chinese fought in the liberation wars but the exact number is unknown, Choy noted. No Chinese names appear on the army rolls because it was common to take on Spanish names.

Choy also spoke in Quemado de Güines and Corralillo in Villa Clara province, the region where he grew up and joined the revolutionary movement. The event in Quemado de Güines drew 230 people, one of the largest turnouts of the seven meetings. He noted that the area was known for the outstanding role of combatants in the underground struggle against Batista and, after the victory of the revolution, in the successful battles in the early 1960s to crush counterrevolutionaries who sowed terror in the Escambray mountains.

One of the revolutionary heroes in that area, Choy explained, was Delfín Sen Cedré, a worker of Chinese ancestry. In early 1961 when Cuba’s revolutionary leadership launched a mass literacy campaign, tens of thousands of youth went into the countryside to teach people to read and write. The unions also issued a call to their members, and Sen Cedré was one of many workers who volunteered to work as literacy teachers in some of the most dangerous areas. That year he was murdered by U.S.-backed counterrevolutionaries, who targeted literacy volunteers as part of their campaign of terror in that region.  
 
Cuba, China, and Angola
Sío Wong spoke at five of the meetings in the seven-city tour. At the event in Bayamo, he emphasized that “the publication of this book is important for telling the truth about the Cuban Revolution—not only here but in other countries.”

He remarked that he had recently read an article in the Militant on the Chinese community in Venezuela, and cited a Chinese-Venezuelan woman who said she knew Cuba is the only Latin American country where there is no discrimination against those of Chinese ancestry.

“The principal measure taken in Cuba against discrimination was the socialist revolution,” he said.

In China too, Sío Wong said, the example of the Cuban Revolution needs to be known. He noted that from the mid-1960s, when what was called the Cultural Revolution in China began, to the end of the 1980s when the Soviet-led bloc imploded, relations between Havana and Beijing were very bad.

In the 1970s, he noted, Chinese advisors trained pro-imperialist troops from Zaire that were attacking Angola, while tens of thousands of internationalist Cuban volunteers fought alongside the Angolan army and defeated the invasions by the Zairian forces and the South African apartheid regime, a story that is told in the book. He explained how in 1976 Angolan and Cuban forces captured Zairian soldiers together with some Chinese advisors and Chinese-made weapons.

At that time “China had a great deal of political influence throughout Africa,” even in the Angolan army, he said. When one Angolan official welcomed him as a “Chinese comrade,” Sío Wong clarified, “I am one of Fidel Castro’s Chinese comrades, not one of Mao Zedong’s.”

For 25 years little was published in China about Cuba and vice versa. When relations between the two countries began to improve Sío Wong led the first high-level Cuban delegation to China in 1989. He described for the audience the widespread lack of knowledge about the Cuban Revolution there except for a handful of those of his generation, going back to the early years of the revolution.

That is why it is so important that Our History Is Still Being Written is now being translated to Chinese for publication in that country, Sío Wong said.

“There are also hundreds of thousands of Chinese living in the United States and Canada,” he added. “Now they will be able to read about this history, too.”

Sío Wong pointed to the significance of books published by Pathfinder and of communists who sell and distribute them in the United States. “They are doing work in the belly of the monster, of imperialism. I consider them fighters and compañeros.”

“The U.S. government talks about the need for a ‘transition’ in Cuba. Well, here we can see the transition,” said Sío Wong at the meeting in Bayamo. He pointed to the audience, which spanned multiple generations including both longtime revolutionary combatants and high school youth. “The transition we are making is toward more socialism,” he said to applause.

Following the presentation in Bayamo, several students from the Camilo Cienfuegos military high school were among those who eagerly came over to the display of Pathfinder books. “I didn’t know all those things about the history of the Chinese in Cuba,” said Julio Miyares Hechavarría, 17.

His classmate Juan Alberto Pérez Espinoza, also 17, commented on Washington’s call for a “transition” in Cuba. “Transition?” he asked dismissively. “It’s the United States that needs a transition, not us!”
 
 
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How Cuba's working people averted U.S. threat of nuclear war in 1962  
 
 
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