Vol. 73/No. 32      August 24, 2009

Waters, who edited the book, visited Australia after participating in the “Rising Dragons, Soaring Bananas” international conference on the Chinese diaspora held in New Zealand July 17-19. (See Militant article, Aug. 10, 2009). The Transnational and Transcultural Studies Research Network and the Latin American Studies Network organized the seminar attended by 26 people, including students, academics, Cuba solidarity activists, and the Cuban consuls to Australia.

Adrian Hearn, a researcher at Sydney University studying China’s relations with Latin America, shared the platform with Waters and posed questions to her, giving the seminar a conversational format. Hearn drew on some of his own research in Cuba to amplify important points. “This book is about three ordinary citizens of Cuba of Chinese descent. What is it that makes people so interested in their story?” Hearn asked.

“The breadth of interest especially among those who are new to the Cuban Revolution,” Waters responded, “has to do with what is happening in the world today.” She pointed to the historic waves of immigration to imperialist countries over the last 20 years and the struggles for immigrants’ rights that have occurred, such as the May Day marches by millions a couple of years ago in the United States demanding legalization for immigrants. “As these struggles take place especially in the midst of a deepening world economic contraction and sharpening class conflicts—people begin searching for their own history,” Waters said. “They want to learn about the generations that preceded them and about the struggles they lived through.”

Waters also spoke at a July 26 Militant Labour Forum on “Cuba and Africa” together with Tom Baumann from the Young Socialists. Baumann is also the Socialist Workers candidate for Manhattan borough president in local elections in November.

Baumann spoke about the importance of supporting the international campaign to free five Cuban revolutionaries who have been unjustly held in U.S. jails for nearly 11 years. Ramón Labañino, René González, Gerardo Hernández, Antonio Guerrero, and Fernando González, known internationally as the Cuban Five, were arrested in 1998 and convicted in a frame-up trial in 2001 of a range of trumped-up charges, including “conspiracy to commit espionage.”

Baumann noted that three of the Five had been part of Cuba’s internationalist mission, which took place from 1975-91, to help the Angolan people defeat invasions by the apartheid South African regime. “Their case is one more example of the U.S. government policy, consistent over 10 U.S. administrations, of punishing the people of Cuba for making and defending a socialist revolution,” Baumann said.

Waters began her remarks with what is happening in the world today, saying, “This is the only framework within which to understand the changes in Africa and the international importance of the Cuban Revolution.”

She commented on a big difference since her first visit to New Zealand and Australia in 1979. Back then, she said, the two imperialist countries felt like “European outposts sitting on stolen land. Now I feel like I’m in Asia.”

It is important, she said, to counter the general portrayal in the imperialist countries of Africa as a continent of nothing but “misery, poverty, and human violence.”

Drawing on her experiences and observations from two reporting trips to Equatorial Guinea, Waters described how the discovery of oil and the construction of roads and other infrastructure needed to efficiently extract it are impacting the evolution of class relations in the country in important ways. Above all, she noted, alongside the development of a capitalist class you can see a working class beginning to emerge, drawn from around the world.

“You get an education in basic historical materialism,” she said. “The pages of the Communist Manifesto come alive. This is what Marx and Engels described, how the spread of capitalism to every corner gives rise to the modern working class.” At the same time, she explained, the example of Cuba’s internationalist aid points to a different future.

The hour-long discussion that followed helped bring the world into the meeting, with participants who had immigrated to Australia from China and Korea, Guatemala and El Salvador, Sudan and Somalia all joining in.

One person wanted to know what the speakers thought about “21st century socialism,” a term used by Hugo Chávez, president of Venezuela, among others. Baumann and Waters explained that many who use the phrase counterpose the course of the class struggle in Venezuela to the Cuban Revolution. “They think they’ve found a better road—how to make a revolution while the capitalist class continues in place with its economic and military power unbroken,” said Waters. The world capitalist crisis that has begun, with the devastating consequences it will have, will show once again that there is “no third road for the working people of Venezuela, Latin America, and the world,” she added.”

In response to a question about relations between Equatorial Guinea and China, Waters noted the extensive trade relations that exist and China’s development loans to Equatorial Guinea. Chinese construction companies almost exclusively use workers brought in from China, however, as opposed to hiring Equatorial Guineans, and the development of anti-Chinese prejudices is already evident, she said.

Waters explained that a few Chinese doctors help staff the hospital in Bata, the mainland capital, but don’t provide medical services throughout the country as the Cuban volunteers do. Most who are called “Chinese doctors” in Equatorial Guinea are in reality Chinese businessmen who have opened pharmacies that they call clinics.

Waters added that one of the problems the Cuban doctors faced was the fear many Equatorial Guineans have of going to a hospital. They go to their traditional healers first. When they get to a hospital it is sometimes too late to save lives. This underlined the importance of the 122 Equatorial Guinean doctors who have already graduated from the Cuban-staffed medical school in Bata, Waters said.
 
 
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