Vol. 71/No. 17      April 30, 2007

Moderator Bettie Luke, a member of the Organization of Chinese Americans, said the book recounted a little-known history about the Chinese diaspora, including the role of the three authors in Cuba’s revolution.

“I was impressed by the Cuban role in Angola, which I had never heard about,” she said, referring to the Cuban volunteer combatants who helped defeat invasions by the South African apartheid regime.

Moon-Ho Jung, an Asian American history professor, described how Chinese indentured laborers and Blacks in Cuba were allies in the fight against Spanish colonialism in the 19th century. Jung is the author of Coolies and Cane, a book on Chinese labor in Louisiana’s sugarcane plantations after the Civil War.

“Cuba and the Philippines have similar histories except that in Cuba they made a revolution,” said Freedom Allah Siyam, political education officer of BAYAN-USA, an anti-imperialist Filipino group.

Siyam said BAYAN-USA is waging a protest campaign against repression by rightist death squads in the Philippines, which have abducted and killed hundreds of opponents of the U.S.-backed government. He added that the FBI has been harassing him and other Filipino activists in Seattle as part of its “war on terror.”

Tony Chan, author of Gold Mountain: The Chinese in the New World, described the discrimination against Chinese in Canada, where he was raised. “Canadians celebrate July 1 as Canada Day, but we see this as a day of shame, as it was on July 1, 1923, when the Chinese exclusion act was passed.”

Martín Koppel, one of the interviewers of the three generals for the Pathfinder book, thanked Bettie Luke for giving him a tour of the Wing Luke Asian Museum, which highlights facts such as the imprisonment of Japanese Americans during World War II and the 1960s struggles by Chinese and Blacks in Seattle against racist housing restrictions. “Here too the history of the struggles of Asian Americans is still being written,” he said.

Koppel said the book explains what a socialist revolution is and how millions of ordinary men and women have defended it for the past 48 years. “This book is valuable for fighting workers here to see that working people can take power out of the hands of the ruling rich,” he said.

In the discussion period, one person asked whether Beijing was becoming a superpower that would carry out policies mirroring Washington’s earlier anti-Chinese immigration measures.

Tony Chan replied that China is not an imperialist power. Koppel added that Chinese workers and peasants made a socialist revolution, and that despite “market reforms” by Beijing, imperialism has not succeeded in reimposing capitalism. Workers here, he said, should oppose the U.S. bosses’ chauvinist, protectionist campaign against Chinese imports.

A young construction worker asked how working people in the United States could unite despite divisions that are fostered and whether a revolution is possible here. Koppel pointed to the history of class struggle in this country, covered up in history textbooks, that shows the revolutionary potential of workers and farmers, and how the working class has been strengthened over the decades. “The lesson of Cuba is how a revolutionary organization and a program can tap the capacities of working people to wage a struggle and win,” he said.

Bettie Luke ended the meeting by thanking the sponsors, which included the University of Washington’s Department of American Ethnic Studies, Harry Bridges Center for Labor Studies, Latin American Studies Program, the Chicano student group MEChA, and BAYAN-USA.

One of the students in attendance, Andrea Lawson from Western Washington University in Bellingham, told the Militant after the meeting that she has read the book and likes it. Among other things, “as a student taking up environmental studies, I was impressed with how the Cuban government is taking serious steps to clean up the environment.”

Members of the audience bought 21 copies of Our History Is Still Being Written in English and Spanish and a dozen other Pathfinder titles, and five subscribed to the Militant.
 
 
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