Vol. 72/No. 40      October 13, 2008

Hunter chaired an Authors’ Discussion and Book Signing at the library September 25 attended by nearly 100 people. The meeting featured Pathfinder’s title Our History Is Still Being Written: The Story of Three Chinese-Cuban Generals in the Cuban Revolution.

The library is a division of the Atlanta-Fulton Public Library System.

Other sponsors of the meeting were the Program in World History and Cultures of the Department of History at Georgia State University, the GSU Asian Studies Center, Friends of the Auburn Avenue Research Library, Students for Socialist Endeavors at GSU, and Pathfinder Books.

Akilah Nosakhere, manager of the library’s Reference and Research Division, welcomed the audience and introduced several distinguished participants in the meeting. They included professors Douglas Reynolds, director of the Asian Studies Center at GSU; John Garver, from the Department of International Relations at Georgia Institute of Technology; and Jung Ha Kim, from the Department of Sociology at GSU.

Hunter began her remarks speaking in Spanish to welcome several Spanish-speaking workers and a four-person team of volunteers who translated the entire meeting into Spanish.

The broad panel of speakers was: Professor Michelle Reid, from Emory University and an assistant professor of History at GSU; Xavier Kim, a student from the University of Georgia in Athens; Sobukwe Shakura, cochair of the National Network on Cuba and a member of the All African Peoples Revolutionary Party; Jianli Zhao, author of Strangers in the City, a study of Chinese immigration to the southern United States and to Atlanta in particular; and Mary-Alice Waters, editor of Our History Is Still Being Written: The Story of Three Chinese-Cuban Generals in the Cuban Revolution and president of Pathfinder Press.

A blowup of the cover of the new Chinese-language edition of Our History Is Still Being Written was among the attractive displays that lined the meeting room. Waters showed the crowd the first copy of the book, just received from China, and pointed to the important new opportunities it offered for reaching out to the growing numbers of Chinese immigrant workers and students in the United States.

Michelle Reid focused on the major waves of Chinese immigration to Cuba from the mid-1800 to the 1930s.

Kim, a graduate student in agricultural science, spoke about the development of urban agriculture in Cuba to meet the food crisis following the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s. He pointed to the role of Moisés Sío Wong, one of the generals interviewed in the book, in helping to develop and lead this transformation.

Shakura explained that he was first drawn to the Cuban Revolution through his study of Africa as he learned about aid Cuba’s internationalist volunteers gave to liberation struggles from the Congo to Guinea Bissau to Mozambique to Angola and other countries throughout Africa.

Shakura also paid tribute to the consistent work of the Socialist Workers Party and the books published by Pathfinder Press in making the truth about the Cuban Revolution known.

He noted that Our History Is Still Being Written helps people to understand the class differentiations among Chinese in capitalist society and to “see beyond the myth that all Chinese are shopkeepers.”

Shakura concluded his remarks with an appeal for support to free Gerardo Hernández, Ramón Labañino, Antonio Guerrero, Fernando González, and René González, five Cuban revolutionaries who have been unjustly held in U.S. prisons for 10 years. The Cuban Five, as they are known, were arrested in 1998 and framed-up on charges ranging from “conspiracy to commit espionage” to, in one case, “conspiracy to commit murder.” An international campaign to win their freedom has gained broad recognition.

“I am very glad to see this book that tells the story of people whose story would otherwise never be known,” said Jianli Zhao. “I did not know anything about Chinese people in Cuba until two days ago. And the Chinese edition of this book now makes it possible for Chinese in China to know about Chinese in Cuba.”

Zhao noted that the Chinese in the United States were less integrated in social and political life than in Cuba.

“According to the generals, the difference is the social system,” she commented. “I think that’s open for discussion. The availability of Our History Is Still Being Written makes discussion of such questions possible.”

Pulling together the multiple themes of the book that had been touched on by others on the panel, Mary-Alice Waters noted that women and men like the three generals Armando Choy, Gustavo Chui, and Moisés Sío Wong, didn’t set out to make a socialist revolution when they took up arms against the U.S.-backed military dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista in the 1950s. “They fought for a world with a greater degree of social justice.” As the workers and farmers carried out a land reform, a literacy drive, and banned discrimination in hiring and other such measures, they ran into opposition from wealthy Cuban and U.S. property owners, backed by the U.S. government. They refused to capitulate. “To this day that remains the reason for the U.S. rulers hostility toward the Cuban Revolution. It is the reason the Cuban Five are held hostage here,” Waters said. “The policy of the U.S. government is to make the Cuban people pay for the audacity of making a socialist revolution on the doorstep of the United States.”

The broad response to Our History Is Still Being Written taps into enormous struggles and changes in the United States today. Historic new waves of immigrants are coming from Latin America. But the second largest numbers are from China. They are strengthening and transforming the working class and finding ways to resist the deteriorating working and living conditions imposed by the bosses’ drive for profits and to fight for the legalization of all immigrant workers, Waters emphasized.

“As these struggles deepen, working people and students who are fighting to defend themselves are hungry to learn from their own history,” Waters said. “Through the stories of the three Cuban generals you can learn what a socialist revolution means and why it is necessary.”

A lively discussion period followed the presentations with questions and comments on topics ranging from the current election campaign to the impact of the Sino-Soviet dispute on Cuban-Chinese relations.

At the conclusion of the meeting, Jacob Perasso, on behalf of Pathfinder books in Atlanta, presented the library with a donation of several Pathfinder titles for its permanent collection.

Informal discussion continued for another 45 minutes over a delicious spread of snacks.
 
 
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