Vol. 73/No. 1      January 12, 2009

Li Ang, a statistics undergraduate who is president of the China Development Society, said the book, “through the accounts of three Chinese-Cuban generals, tells the little-known story of Chinese immigration to Cuba, and of the Cuban Revolution.

Li showed a clip of an award-winning film by Loni Ding, Coolies, Sailors and Settlers, about Chinese immigration to the Americas. He then introduced Jonathan Silberman of Pathfinder Books in London.

Silberman noted the interest the subject of Our History Is Still Being Written has sparked. “There have been some 60 meetings in seven countries around this book, involving over 4,000 participants,” he said.

This was one of the first such meetings that also celebrated the recent publication of a Chinese-language edition in Beijing. Silberman quoted from the afterword written by Wang Lusha, who translated the book—originally published in English and Spanish—into Chinese.

“Wang recounts the anti-Chinese racism he encountered when living abroad. Such racism is rife in the United Kingdom,” Silberman said. He pointed to the ongoing resistance to the “subminimum wage and life-threatening work conditions of tens of thousands of undocumented Chinese immigrants.” The students groaned in recognition on hearing Wang’s confession that at first, in the face of the prejudice he encountered, he almost felt ashamed to be Chinese.

“One man made me change my opinion,” Wang writes. It was Moisés Sío Wong, one of the three generals interviewed in the book, from whom Wang learned about the role played by the Chinese-Cubans not as victims but as actors, the “people from nowhere” who, surprising the capitalist rulers, helped make the Cuban Revolution.

A lively question-and-answer period followed the presentation. “In China there is a growing gap between the new superrich and ordinary people—is this also true in Cuba?” asked one student. “Can you explain the changes in the Cuban government’s relations with China, from the time of Mao to today, especially in the field of foreign policy?” asked another. A third asked about Cuba’s response to recent natural catastrophes. A fourth asked if “market socialism” would help to develop Cuba’s economy.

Silberman said there is a revolutionary leadership in Cuba, which turns to working people to resolve the country’s economic and social problems. The leadership is seeking to organize working people to boost food production, in order to reduce the continued dependence on food imports and to raise living standards.

The collapse of the Soviet Union and the resulting end of the favorable economic agreements Cuba had with that government precipitated a deep economic crisis in Cuba in the early 1990s, Silberman explained. In response, the Cuban government had to expand trade with the capitalist world. But it did so “while maintaining free education and health care, and raising pensions and the minimum wage.”

Under these conditions, “there has been a growth in unequal living standards, largely based on differential access to foreign currency, which the government is seeking to address,” Silberman said. “But in Cuba there are no private owners of factories, no private employers allowed to employ wage labor, and no billionaire property owners in town or country.”

Silberman remarked that one of the early acts of the Cuban Revolution was to recognize the People’s Republic of China. The Batista dictatorship had refused to recognize the Chinese revolution and considered Taiwan the “government” of China.

For a quarter of a century, with the beginning of the Sino-Soviet rift in the mid-1960s, Silberman said, China’s relations with Cuba were almost nonexistent. He pointed to Havana’s opposition to the Chinese army’s invasion of Vietnam in 1979 and Beijing’s support for the U.S.-backed Pinochet dictatorship in Chile. The two governments also took opposite positions in Angola following the invasion of that country by the apartheid regime of South Africa.

“The Chinese government supported Jonas Savimbi and Holden Roberto,” added an international relations student, referring to the leaders of two U.S.-backed Angolan groups that backed the apartheid regime’s invasion of Angola.

Relations between Cuba and China have improved since then, Silberman said. “Cuban medical personnel were welcomed in China to engage in voluntary work following the terrible earthquake earlier this year,” he noted. There is expanding trade between the two countries. But there is no evidence the Cuban leadership is following the course of reliance on capitalist methods that is prevalent in China,” he said.
 
 
Related articles:
D.C. public library features Cuban Five art exhibit  
 
 
Front page (for this issue) | Home | Text-version home