Vol. 80/No. 29 August 8, 2016
Shared history of China and Cuba began in 1800s
The shared history of China and Cuba began with the arrival of the first shiploads of contract laborers. From 1847 to 1874, some 140,000 Chinese “coolies,” as they were known, were brought to Cuba to work the sugar plantations under near slave-like conditions.
Conference presentations showed that in ways both big and small these first Chinese immigrants helped to shape Cuban society. Rebelling against their conditions of life and work, thousands of Chinese laborers escaped and became soldiers in the revolutionary wars for Cuban independence from Spain that began in 1868, wars that also fought for the abolition of slavery and indentured servitude.
On one panel, Kin-sheun Louie of the Chinese University of Hong Kong described how Chinese medicine was introduced to Cuba along with these indentured workers. Evelyn Hu-DeHart of Brown University spoke on “Chinese Contract Laborers in Cuba: Neo-Slavery or Transition to Free Labor?”
Chinese workers sent letters back home detailing their servitude in Cuba and in Peru, where they worked in silver mines and in collecting guano fertilizer, explained Rudolph Ng from University of Cambridge. Their damning testimony played a role in pressuring the imperial Qing government to officially end the coolie trade in 1874, he said.
Cuba’s revolutionary trajectory
“What distinguishes Chinese in Cuba today from those who settled anywhere else in the world is the near-total absence of discrimination, or even prejudice, against Cubans of Chinese descent,” said Mary-Alice Waters, president of Pathfinder Press and editor of Our History Is Still Being Written: The Story of Three Chinese-Cuban Generals in the Cuban Revolution. The reason, she said, is the “revolutionary political course and integrity of Cuba’s communist leadership.” Her presentation was titled, “Socialist Cuba and China’s Expanded Economic Relations in Latin America and the Caribbean.”In both Cuba and China “great revolutionary struggles in the wake of World War II brought to power leaderships that were identified as socialist,” said Waters, but “from the beginning the political trajectories of their leaderships were diametrically opposed.”
Waters cited several examples of these “divergent class directions,” including Havana’s fight in the mid-1960s to persuade Beijing and Moscow to come together in support of the Vietnamese Revolution and Beijing’s support for murderous military dictatorships in Chile and Argentina in the 1970s. Cuban leaders condemned Beijing’s support for the genocidal Pol Pot regime in Cambodia, and the 1979 Chinese invasion of Vietnam, which they called “criminal,” Waters said.
She described Cuba’s internationalist response when the racist apartheid regime of South Africa invaded Angola in 1975, on the eve of its independence from Portugal. Over the next 16 years “more than 425,000 Cuban volunteers helped defend Angola against the ongoing war waged by South Africa and its U.S. backers,” she said, helping bring about the end of apartheid. By contrast the Chinese government pursued a policy of collaboration with the Angolan forces supported by the South African regime.
In recent years, Waters noted, Beijing’s increased trade with Havana has been linked with “pressure to persuade Cuba’s leadership to follow China’s example of what some refer to as ‘market socialism,’ that is, the free development of capitalist market relations in all spheres,” — a path that revolutionary Cuba has steadfastly rejected.
This political trajectory of the Cuban Revolution, Waters noted in conclusion, also explains why the elimination of discrimination against Chinese in Cuba was possible. In the words of Moisés Sío Wong, one of the authors of Our History Is Still Being Written, the reason the status of Chinese-Cubans is different from anywhere else in the world “is that here a socialist revolution took place. The revolution eliminated discrimination based on the color of a person’s skin. Above all, it eliminated the property relations that create not only economic but also social inequality between rich and poor.”
Meeting in Chinatown
Discussion on the Chinese in Cuba continued after the ISSCO gathering at a July 10 “community dialogue” entitled “The Chinese-Cuban Connections.” Conference participant Kin-sheun Louie gave a talk in Cantonese, which is spoken by the largest number of Chinese in the Vancouver area, opening the event. It was followed by a lively discussion that helped dispel the widespread misconception that all the Chinese left Cuba following the victory of the socialist revolution in 1959.The event was organized by the Pacific Canada Heritage Centre-Museum of Migration, whose display of books and documents at the conference had attracted a lot of interest.
Some 30 people attended the meeting in Vancouver’s Chinatown, including workers, small business owners and students from the area. It was held in the historic building of another conference sponsor, the Ing Suey Sun Tong Association of Vancouver, established in 1914 to provide a home away from home for members of the Ing clan.
Related articles:
Vancouver meeting discusses struggles of Chinese overseas
Cuban revolutionaries speak to workers across UK
González and Hernández: Join campaign to end US economic war, return Guantánamo to Cuba
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