Vol. 71/No. 19      May 14, 2007

Moderator Martín Koppel, one of the interviewers of the generals for the book, opened the program with a segment of the film Coolies, Sailors, and Settlers by Loni Ding. It shows the global forces that brought Asians to the Americas in the 18th and 19th centuries, including the arrival in 1847 of the first Chinese indentured laborers, to replace or supplement African slave labor on sugar plantations.

The documentary was followed by a slide show with photos from the book, narrated by Maura DeLuca, who took part in presentations of the Pathfinder book in Cuba last February.

Panelist Carole Huang, a professor of educational policy at City College of New York and a specialist in Asian American studies, said she found fascinating the book’s picture of the integration of Chinese immigrants into Cuban society and revolutionary history, as shown through the lives of the generals. “The population in Cuba with Chinese heritage is greater than we would expect,” she said.

Huang said that as an educator she was especially impressed by how Cuba eradicated illiteracy in 1961, through the mobilization of 100,000 youth who taught a million people to read and write in a year. Asked to compare Cuba’s literacy drive to those of other countries, Huang said today there was nothing comparable to what revolutionary Cuba has accomplished. She cited the post-Civil War U.S. South, where African Americans, newly emancipated, fought for literacy campaigns until they were set back by the defeat of Radical Reconstruction.

Mary-Alice Waters, editor of Our History Is Still Being Written and president of Pathfinder Press, explained that the working people and youth who brought down the U.S.-backed dictatorship in 1959 did not have socialism in mind. They simply wanted a more just society. But as they carried out a sweeping agrarian reform, opened the door to equality for women, and uprooted institutionalized racism, they came into head-on conflict with the U.S. robber-baron owners of Cuba’s economic wealth. Cuban workers and peasants refused to back down, and took control of their own resources through a revolution that overthrew capitalism. To this day, Washington’s goal is “to get rid of the socialist revolution and to punish the Cuban people,” she said.

Waters said the book leads readers to the largely untold story of Chinese and other Asian immigrants to the U.S. and to their proud record of resistance to oppression. She said it helps us “better understand the struggles by immigrant workers today, why millions are in the streets, and their crucial importance.”

Asked what the generals do today, Waters replied that “all three carry weighty responsibilities in Cuban society.” At the same time, “they are not exceptional but representative” of hundreds of thousands of ordinary Cubans who have transformed society and themselves.

In response to questions about relations between China and Cuba, Waters noted that from the beginning the revolutionary government in Havana maintained relations with the People’s Republic of China, but with the Sino-Soviet rift and the Mao regime’s “Cultural Revolution” in the mid-1960s, relations became nearly nonexistent for a quarter century. There was little published in China about Cuba and vice versa. Now there is growing trade and other contacts between the two countries. That’s why, she added, “the three generals are so happy this book is being translated into Chinese,” so people there can learn about the example of the Cuban Revolution.

Huang held up a Chinese-language biography of Argentine-Cuban revolutionary leader Che Guevara and said the revived interest in Cuba could be seen in China when five years ago 50,000 copies of that book were sold in 15 days.

A number of people attending the meeting were regular visitors to the Flushing library. One, Michi Otani, who is Japanese American, said it was the first time she had been to a discussion about the revolution in Cuba.

Five students came from the State University of New York in Albany. One of them, Lindsey Mangeri, said she was particularly interested to learn how “the character of the Cuban Revolution has a direct relation to the U.S. struggle.”

Seven people purchased Our History Is Still Being Written, and two subscribed to the Militant. Afterward, about 30 people adjourned to a nearby restaurant for dinner and to continue the discussion.
 
 
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