The Militant (logo)  

Vol. 72/No. 23      June 9, 2008

 
(front page)
Students learn about Cuba at
book event on California campus
 
Militant/Eric Simpson
May 20 panel at the University of California, Davis. From left: UC student Ana Ochoa; Mary-Alice Waters, editor of Our History Is Still Being Written; Wendy Ho, director of Asian American Studies; and Luz Mena, Women and Gender Studies professor.

BY BETSEY STONE
AND ROBBY SILVER
 
DAVIS, California—Students involved in working-class struggles and attracted to the example of the Cuban Revolution put their stamp on a May 20 meeting at the University of California Davis (UCD) on the book Our History Is Still Being Written: The Story of Three Chinese-Cuban Generals in the Cuban Revolution.

The meeting was sponsored by the Asian American Studies Department, Women and Gender Studies, and Pathfinder Books. A majority of the 70 participants were students, including several who had studied abroad in Cuba. Members of the campus chapter of MEChA (Chicano Student Movement of Aztlán)—many of whom are active in the fight for immigrants’ rights, in support of struggles by campus workers, and protests around other social issues—attended the meeting and took part in the discussion.

“While I was in Cuba I attended the annual book fair in Havana where I was first introduced to Our History Is Still Being Written,” said student Ana Ochoa, one of the panelists. Ochoa studied in Havana during the winter 2007 quarter as part of a UCD program. While there, she attended an event at the Havana International Book Fair that featured the authors of the book, generals Armando Choy, Gustavo Chui, and Moisés Sío Wong, and the book’s editor Mary-Alice Waters.

Our History Is Still Being Written, published by Pathfinder Press, is built on interviews with the three generals, who as teenagers in the 1950s joined the revolutionary struggle to overthrow U.S.-backed dictator Fulgencio Batista.  
 
‘Battle of Ideas’
Ochoa said she had been struck by the campaign of Cuba’s revolutionary government known as “the Battle of Ideas.” In the book, she said, Sío Wong describes how by the late 1990s, 76,000 young people in Cuba were neither going to school nor working. In response, the Cuban government and mass organizations launched a series of social programs “to provide a way for these young people to contribute to the society. Educational programs were set up where they could study at no cost to themselves.”

She added that the Battle of Ideas also refers to the need for Cubans to know their history, both hardships and accomplishments, so as to better understand current politics. This, she said, is an outcome of the socialist revolution that believes that education and culture should be accessible to all.

The program was kicked off by My Diem Nguyen, student affairs officer in Asian American Studies, who helped organize an April 23 demonstration protesting U.S. government plans to deport Vietnamese, Laotian, and Cambodian immigrants.

Nguyen pointed out that protests by students today make the stories of the three Chinese Cuban generals very contemporary. “It was inspiring reading in the book how the movement began with students in school, with young people organizing,” she said.  
 
Example of Cuban agriculture
Wendy Ho, director of Asian American Studies, chaired the meeting and described how her own ancestors had arrived in Hawaii as agricultural workers on the plantations there. She pointed to the example described in the book of the development of urban agriculture in Cuba in the l990s in response to severe food shortages at the time. “We should look at this,” she said, “given food riots in Africa, in Ethiopia, in the Americas, in Haiti, where there is hunger and scarcities of the basic staples like rice and wheat.”

Panelist Luz Mena, a professor of Women and Gender Studies, teaches a popular “Women and Revolution” course on campus and lived in Cuba in the early 1990s when the economic crisis known as the Special Period was most severe. She frequently travels to Cuba researching the history of 19th century Havana.

Beginning in the 1840s, she told the meeting, Chinese were brought in the hundreds of thousands to replace and also work alongside African slaves on the plantations. “There were racist motives behind this. The Spanish colonialists feared a Black takeover in Cuba like had happened in Haiti,” she said. “They hoped the Chinese would be more docile.” This did not turn out to be the case, Mena noted, describing resistance by Chinese workers in the face of racist treatment.  
 
Joined struggle as teenagers
Mary-Alice Waters, president of Pathfinder Press, described how the three generals became the revolutionists they are today. “They did not start out as socialists,” she noted.

“They were teenagers when they decided they were not going to accept a life of brutalities and indignities under a dictatorship and joined the struggle to overthrow it. When that struggle triumphed they set out to build a society with a greater degree of social equality. They were part of the revolutionary forces that carried out a massive land reform, mobilized young people to go to the countryside and into the barrios to wipe out illiteracy, slashed rents, made racial discrimination in hiring and access to public facilities illegal, and brought women in greater numbers into the workforce.

“As they carried out such democratic measures they came into head-on conflict with the economic interests of the wealthy property owners of Cuba and the United States.

“In the face of this, they simply refused to back down,” Waters said, “organizing millions of working people to take the fields and factories and mines into their own hands.”

Waters tied the broad interest in Our History is Still Being Written to the deepening working-class resistance in the United States today and the vanguard place of many workers and students who are immigrants.  
 
Question on Cuba military
In the lively discussion that followed the presentations, a Cuban-born student questioned whether it was positive for generals, and the Cuban army, to be involved in so many things. “I don’t trust the U.S. army to spread its influence, to be in education and other areas,” he said.

“As regards the U.S. army I agree with you 100 percent,” replied Waters. “The U.S. army is an imperialist army that does not act in the interests of you or me. It defends capitalism and U.S. property interests around the world.”

“The Cuban army is the opposite,” she said. “It’s a class question. The Revolutionary Armed Forces were born in the struggle to overthrow the Batista dictatorship, in the defense of Cuba from imperialism, as we saw at the Bay of Pigs, and during the ‘missile’ crisis. This is reflected in the composition of the armed forces. They defend the interests of Cuba’s working people. They have a policy that 50 percent of the students entering the officer training schools come from working-class and peasant backgrounds.”

“Unlike the former Soviet Union, China, or Vietnam, there is no privileged officer caste,” Waters said. “In the 1980s, when there was pressure from the Soviet Union to do the opposite, they decisively rejected privileges for military officers like special hospitals and resorts and extra rations.”  
 
Access to cell phones
Cat Callaway, an agriculture program student who visited Cuba in 2006 to learn more about its urban farming programs, asked whether or not the growing accessibility of things like cell phones and computers “will lead to a drop in people willing to do this work.”

Waters said that the possibility of broader access to cell phones for Cubans reflects the economic progress being made in Cuba today. The primary reason for the previous restriction on cell phone availability, she said, was that Cuba did not yet have the technological infrastructure to meet the demand.

“Agriculture is hard work,” Waters emphasized. “When youth have the opportunity to go to the university the draw away from the land is real. That’s true everywhere. The answer is greater mechanization and increased productivity.”

Waters noted that every time in the course of the revolution that Cuba has faced a crisis in agriculture or other production, “it is the working people themselves who have been involved in finding answers and correcting the course. That is what a socialist revolution is all about.”

“For many in my generation, we know little about Cuba except for hearing through the media of Fidel and Che, with Fidel being portrayed as the absolute bad guy, and Che being turned into a pop icon,” said freshman Veronica Lopez after the meeting. “What stood out for me in the discussion was learning that this is a revolution that brought down racism.”

“I learned a lot from the panel,” said MEChA activist Cristal Muñoz. “I found especially interesting what the Cubans did fighting in Angola,” referring to the 1975-89 internationalist mission in which hundreds of thousands of Cuban troops helped defeat the invasion of Angola by the South African apartheid army.

“It was good to see that the generals, despite their being older, still keep going,” added Muñoz.

A dozen students joined other participants afterward at a nearby restaurant to continue the discussion, relating stories of how they organized and participated in May Day and other actions, and how they defended their right to free speech against rightist forces on campus such as the Young Republicans.  
 
 
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