Vol. 71/No. 12      March 26, 2007

The meeting, which drew 100 people, was one of the A/P/A’s regular forums. It was cosponsored by NYU’s China House, the student group LUCHA, and the Museum of Chinese in the Americas.

The book tells the story of three Chinese-Cubans—Moisés Sío Wong, Armando Choy, and Gustavo Chui—who joined the battle to overthrow the U.S.-backed dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista. Through that struggle they became leading participants in the Cuban Revolution, from its triumph in 1959 to today.

The panelists were Kathleen López, assistant professor of Latin American and Puerto Rican Studies at Lehman College of the City University of New York; Mary-Alice Waters, the book’s editor and president of Pathfinder Press; and Awam Amkpa, director of Africana Studies at NYU and an associate professor of drama at the Tisch School of the Arts. Lok Siu, an associate professor of Anthropology and Social and Cultural Analysis at NYU, moderated the program.

The meeting opened with the short film 71 by New Jersey-based filmmaker María Lau. The documentary depicted Lau’s search for her Chinese ancestry in Cuba through images and narration.

López then spoke, describing the “floating coffins” of the coolie trade—the ships that brought some 142,000 Chinese to Cuba between 1847 and 1874 as indentured laborers. Some 17,000 Chinese perished on the journey, she noted.

Showing slides of Chinese-Cubans who fought in Cuba’s war for independence from Spain, López said they were respected for their role in that struggle.

After independence, while Havana’s Chinatown flourished, racial discrimination and racist prejudice remained part of Cuban society, López said. “The family of Gustavo Chui, whose mother was Black, stripped her of her rights to the child,” she said. The three generals, she added, “credit Cuba’s socialist revolution for ending racism.”

Waters brought greetings from the three generals, including Choy who said in a note to Waters that the meeting was taking place on International Women’s Day. She also greeted Jorge Luis Dustet, of the Cuban diplomatic mission to the United Nations, and Maritzel González, a visiting leader of the Federation of Cuban Women, who were both present.

The three generals were part of a generation in Cuba that refused to accept the brutality of the U.S.-backed Batista dictatorship, Waters noted. When the revolution instituted measures to address the vast disparity between rich and poor, it “earned the implacable hostility of American imperialism,” she said.

Waters said Pathfinder Press is a unique publishing house. “It is not an academic but a political publisher,” she said. Our History Is Still Being Written and other books published by Pathfinder, like many with the speeches of Malcolm X, are intended above all for those in the United States today “who refuse to bow down” like the three Cuban revolutionaries interviewed in the book.

Amkpa, originally from Nigeria, spoke about Cuba’s record in Africa. He also described the conditions facing most Africans today, for whom, unlike in Cuba, the anticolonial movements brought formal independence but not greater social equality, national unity, and the uprooting of the property relations that are the base of race and sex discrimination.

“Cuba became a natural ally of the anticolonial movement,” he noted. “The Cubans not only checked, but turned around the war in Angola.” The three generals all served as part of Cuba’s campaign in 1975-91 to defend newly independent Angola from invasions by the South African apartheid regime.

“The Cubans substantially reorganized rural health systems in Nigeria,” he said, describing how the Nigerian doctors wouldn’t go there. The Cuban doctors, he explained, became the backbone of the public health system in the countryside.

Responding to a question in the discussion period on whether Cuba’s and China’s image have changed over time, Amkpa said, “During the Cold War, the image of China was much bigger and higher. China was seen as an ally of the anticolonial movement.”

China is viewed differently today, he added. “Its activities in Africa are now state capitalist.” While Beijing invests in mining and elsewhere, most Africans don’t see benefits from these operations.

“Cuba’s image has not changed,” Amkpa said. “Cuba has not lost its place yet and I don’t think it will.”

Ten people bought the book, and many stayed for a reception at the end.
 
 
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